Now it seems, if not confirmed, thought by today's astronomers to be very likely that the beautiful construct in the Eagle nebula, called the Pillars of Creation, may in fact have been destroyed thousands of years ago by the shock wave from a nearby supernova. This fact will be extremely hard to to confirm however. Because of the distance ( in overall stellar terms the pillars are pretty close, relatively speaking, some 7000 light years distant) it will be at least another millennium before the light from their destruction starts to reach us.
"The Pillars of Creation" was taken by the Hubble telescope in 1995. The Pillars are of great interest by astronomers because these columns of dust and gas are likely places where stars form. which makes the next time they were re-imaged turned out to be a bit melancholy. In 2007 researchers again focused on this region of space using the Spitzer Space Telescope. These new images showed the Pillars and next to them, a giant cloud of hot dust thought to have been heated by the blast of a star that possibly went supernova.
What's more this shock wave could have already reached the Pillars, causing them to disintegrate about 6,000 years ago. (hence the 1000 year estimate before we start to see evidence of the destruction)
Read more at the Daily Galaxy here
And an excellent break down of this information in the Wikipedia here
