There’s a lot hiding in the universe’s dark corners. Interstellar dust clouds and inky stretches of deep space can appear dull to ordinary telescopes. But to a car-size telescope 26 million miles (41.8 million kilometers) from Earth, they are alive with light—infrared light, or heat rays. Since its launch in August 2003, says Robert Kennicutt, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope “has opened up half the universe to us.”
This artist’s concept depicts a type of dead star called a pulsar and the surrounding disk of rubble discovered by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. The pulsar, called 4U 0142+61, was once a massive star until about 100,000 years ago when it blew up in a supernova explosion and scattered dusty debris into space. Some of that debris was captured into what astronomers refer to as a “fallback disk,” now circling the remaining stellar core, or pulsar. The disk resembles proto planetary disks around young stars, out of which planets are thought to be born.
This composite image from three space telescopes shows a debris cloud called Cassiopeia A. The 15-light-year-wide cloud was formed when a star exploded 325 years ago, leaving a trail of gas (blue, green, and yellow) surrounded by a shell of interstellar space dust (red).
This image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows infant stars “hatching” in the head of the hunter constellation,Orion.
Two extremely bright stars illuminate a greenish mist in this image from the new “GLIMPSE360? survey from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. This fog is comprised of hydrogen and carbon compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are found right here on Earth in sooty vehicle exhaust and on charred grills.
This composite image of the Tycho supernova remnant shows the scene more than four centuries after the brilliant star explosion witnessed by Tycho Brahe and other astronomers of that era. The explosion has left a blazing hot cloud of expanding debris (green and yellow). The location of the blast’s outer shock wave can be seen as a blue sphere of ultra-energetic electrons. Newly synthesized dust in the ejected material and heated pre-existing dust from the area around the supernova radiate at infrared wavelengths of 24 microns (red). Foreground and background stars in the image are white.
The Hubble Space Telescope snapped the Crab Nebula, a remnant of an explosion recorded by Japanese and Chinese astronomers in 1054. The super-duper firecracker, still expanding, is six light years wide.
This magnificent photograph taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope shows a bizarre false colour view of the Helix Nebula. Located around 700 light years from Earth, in the constellation of Aquarius, this stunning nebula was once a star similar to our own Sun. When the star used up all its fuel and died, it hurled off its outer layers, creating the view we see today.
This image was taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope back in 2004, and provides the most detailed view yet of the dust of another spiral galaxy. At least until the Herschel Space Observatory takes a look at Andromeda. Andromeda if you don’t know, is our nearest neighbor spiral galaxy and is scheduled to collide with the Milky Way galaxy (That’s us), in about 2 billion years.
This Hubble Space Telescope image, released Nov. 11, shows a detailed view of star-birth in the spiral galaxy M83, 15 million light-years away in the constellation Hydra. The image reveals in unprecedented detail the current rapid rate of star-birth in this famous “grand design” spiral galaxy, known as the “Southern Pinwheel“.
This artist’s concept illustrates a solar system that is a much younger version of our own. Dusty disks, like the one shown here circling the star, are thought to be the breeding grounds of planets, including rocky ones like Earth. Astronomers spotted some of the raw ingredients for DNA and protein in one such disk belonging to a star called IRS 46. The ingredients, gaseous precursors to DNA and protein called acetylene and hydrogen cyanide, were detected in the star’s inner disk, the region where scientists believe Earth-like planets would be most likely to form.
This image shows a turbulent star-forming region, where rivers of gas and stellar winds are eroding thickets of dusty material. Spitzer’s infrared view of the stormy region, is called M17, or the Swan nebula. The Swan is located about 6,000 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius.Dominating the center of the Swan is a group of massive stars, some exceeding 40 times the mass of our sun. These central stars are 100,000 to one million times as bright as the sun, and roar with radiation and fierce winds made of charged particles that speed along at up to 7.2 million kilometers per hour (4.5 million miles per hour).
This infrared image shows the Rosette nebula, a pretty star-forming region more than 5,000 light-years away in the constellation Monoceros. In optical light, the nebula looks like a rosebud, or the “rosette” adornments that date back to antiquity. But lurking inside this delicate cosmic rosebud are so-called planetary “danger zones” (see spheres illustrations in figure 1). These zones surround super hot stars, called O-stars (blue stars inside spheres), which give off intense winds and radiation. Young, cooler stars that just happen to reside within one of these zones are in danger of having their dusty planet-forming materials stripped away.
NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope observed a fledgling solar system like the one depicted in this artist’s concept, and discovered deep within it enough water vapor to fill the oceans on Earth five times. This water vapor starts out in the form of ice in a cloudy cocoon (not pictured) that surrounds the embryonic star, called NGC 1333-IRAS 4B (buried in center of image). Material from the cocoon, including ice, falls toward the center of the cloud. The ice then smacks down onto a dusty pre-planetary disk circling the stellar embryo (doughnut-shaped cloud) and vaporizes. Eventually, this water might make its way into developing planets.
A never-before-seen view of the turbulent heart of our Milky Way galaxy provided by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and its companion Great Observatories (the Spitzer Space Telescope and the Chandra X-ray Observatory) commemorated the 400 years since Galileo first turned his telescope to the heavens in 1609. In this spectacular image, observations using infrared light and X-ray light see through the obscuring dust and reveal the intense activity near the galactic core. Note that the center of the galaxy is located within the bright white region to the right of and just below the middle of the image. The entire image width covers about one-half a degree, about the same angular width as the full moon.
This image shows an outflow of gas from a new star as it jets from a space object dubbed IRAS 21078+5211. The reddish blob in its center, as picked up by the 4.5-micron infrared band on NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, contrasts nicely with the clouds, colored green here, that surround it. These so – called shocked outflows ram into the hydrogen gas around them and make it glow — a bright beacon in the lonely outskirts of the Milky Way.
Scientists have reported the first conclusive discovery of water vapor in the atmosphere of an exoplanet, or a planet beyond our solar system. This artist’s impression shows a gas-giant exoplanet transiting across the face of its star. Infrared analysis by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope of this type of system provided the breakthrough. The planet, HD 189733b, lies 63 light-years away in the constellation Vulpecula. It was discovered in 2005 as it transited its parent star, dimming the star’s light by some three percent.
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