The Sputnik 1 (PS-1) satellite is shown here on a rigging truck in the assembly shop in the fall of 1957 as a technician puts finishing touches on it. When the development of the first advanced scientific satellite, Object D, proved to be more difficult than expected, the Soviets decided to launch a simpler, smaller satellite. PS-1, or Sputnik 1, began development in November 1956. The pressurized sphere made of aluminum alloy had five primary scientific objectives: 1. Test the method of placing an artificial satellite into Earth orbit, 2. Provide information on the density of the atmosphere by calculating its lifetime in orbit, 3. Test radio and optical methods of orbital tracking, 4. Determine the effects of radio wave propagation though the atmosphere, and 5. Check principles of pressurization used on the satellites. On October 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 successfully launched and entered Earth's orbit. Sputnik shocked the world, giving the USSR the distinction of putting the first human-made object into space and putting the United States a step behind in the space race.
Date
1957
NASA Center
Headquarters
Eyes in the Sky
Title
Eyes in the Sky
Description
These shape-shifting galaxies have taken on the form of a giant mask. The icy blue eyes are actually the cores of two merging galaxies, called NGC 2207 and IC 2163, and the mask is their spiral arms. The false-colored image consists of infrared data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (red) and visible data from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (blue/green). NGC 2207 and IC 2163 met and began a sort of gravitational tango about 40 million years ago. The two galaxies are tugging at each other, stimulating new stars to form. Eventually, this cosmic ball will come to an end, when the galaxies meld into one. The dancing duo is located 140 million light-years away in the Canis Major constellation. The infrared data from Spitzer highlight the galaxies' dusty regions, while the visible data from Hubble indicates starlight. In the Hubble-only image (not pictured here), the dusty regions appear as dark lanes. The Hubble data correspond to light with wavelengths of .44 and .55 microns (blue and green, respectively). The Spitzer data represent light of 8 microns.
Fade to Red
Title
Fade to Red
Description
This animation shows the Andromeda galaxy, first as seen in visible light by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, then as seen in infrared by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The visible-light image highlights the galaxy's population of about one trillion stars. The stars are so crammed into its core that this region blazes with bright starlight. In contrast, the false-colored Spitzer view reveals red waves of dust against a more tranquil sea of blue stars. The dust lanes can be seen twirling all the way into the galaxy's center. This dust is warmed by young stars and shines at infrared wavelengths , which are represented in red. The blue color signifies shorter-wavelength infrared light primarily from older stars. The Andromeda galaxy, also known affectionately by astronomers as Messier 31, is located 2.5 million light-years away in the constellation Andromeda. It is the closest major galaxy to the Milky Way, making it the ideal specimen for carefully examining the nature of galaxies. On a clear, dark night, the galaxy can be spotted with the naked eye as a fuzzy blob. Andromeda's entire disk spans about 260,000 light-years, which means that a light beam would take 260,000 years to travel from one end of the galaxy to the other. By comparison, the Milky Way is about 100,000 light-years across. When viewed from Earth, Andromeda occupies a portion of the sky equivalent to seven full moons. Because this galaxy is so large, the infrared images had to be stitched together out of about 3,000 separate Spitzer exposures. The light detected by Spitzer's infrared array camera at 3.6 and 4.5 microns is sensitive mostly to starlight and is shown in blue and green, respectively. The 8-micron light shows warm dust and is shown in red. The contribution from starlight has been subtracted from the 8-micron image to better highlight the dust structures.
Cigar Galaxy up in Smoke
Title
Cigar Galaxy up in Smoke
Description
This movie compares a visible-light view of the "Cigar galaxy" to an infrared view from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of the same galaxy. The movie begins with the visible image of the galaxy looking cool as a cucumber, then fades into the infrared image, revealing a smokin' hot "cigar." The visible-light picture of the Cigar galaxy, also called Messier 82, shows only a bar of light against a dark patch of space. Longer exposures of the galaxy (not pictured here) have revealed cone-shaped clouds of hot gas above and below the galaxy's plane. It took Spitzer's three sensitive instruments to show that the galaxy is also surrounded by a huge, hidden halo of smoky dust (red in infrared image). The infrared image above was taken by Spitzer's infrared array camera. The dust particles (red) are being blown out into space by the galaxy's hot stars (blue). Spitzer's infrared spectrograph told astronomers that the dust contains a carbon-containing compound, called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon. This smelly molecule can be found on Earth in tailpipes, barbecue pits and other places where combustion reactions have occurred. Messier 82 is located about 12 million light-years away in the Ursa Major constellation. It is viewed from its side, or edge on, so it appears as a thin cigar-shaped bar. The galaxy is termed a starburst because its core is a fiery hotbed of stellar birth. A larger nearby galaxy, called Messier 81, is gravitationally interacting with Messier 82, prodding it into producing the new stars. The infrared picture was taken as a part of the Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxy Survey. Blue indicates infrared light of 3.6 microns, green corresponds to 4.5 microns, and red to 5.8 and 8.0 microns. The contribution from starlight (measured at 3.6 microns) has been subtracted from the 5.8- and 8-micron images to enhance the visibility of the dust features. The visible-light picture is from the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, Ariz.
Old and 'Red' Distant Galaxi
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Title
Old and 'Red' Distant Galaxies
Description
This image provides a close-up look at two of the extremely bright infrared galaxies revealed by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. While they are very faint (bottom) or even completely invisible (top) in the deepest-ever optical images obtained by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, Spitzer easily picked them up because of their strong infrared emissions. Astronomers believe these galaxies are particularly "red" because they are very old and appear to go back in time to a period when the universe was only two billion years old.
Cartwheel Galaxy Makes Waves
Title
Cartwheel Galaxy Makes Waves
Description
This false-color composite image shows the Cartwheel galaxy as seen by the Galaxy Evolution Explorer's Far Ultraviolet detector (blue), the Hubble Space Telescope's Wide Field and Planetary Camera-2 in B-band visible light (green), the Spitzer Space Telescope's Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) at 8 microns (red), and the Chandra X-ray Observatory's Advanced CCD Imaging Spectrometer-S array instrument (purple). Approximately 100 million years ago, a smaller galaxy plunged through the heart of Cartwheel galaxy, creating ripples of brief star formation. In this image, the first ripple appears as an ultraviolet-bright blue outer ring. The blue outer ring is so powerful in the GALEX observations that it indicates the Cartwheel is one of the most powerful UV-emitting galaxies in the nearby universe. The blue color reveals to astronomers that associations of stars 5 to 20 times as massive as our sun are forming in this region. The clumps of pink along the outer blue ring are regions where both X-rays and UV radiation are superimposed in the image. These X-ray point sources are very likely collections of binary star systems containing a blackhole (called Massive X-ray Binary Systems). The X-ray sources seem to cluster around optical/UV bright supermassive star clusters. The yellow-orange inner ring and nucleus at the center of the galaxy result from the combination of visible and infrared light, which is stronger towards the center. This region of the galaxy represents the second ripple, or ring wave, created in the collision, but has much less star for mation activity than the first (outer) ring wave. The wisps of red spread throughout the interior of the galaxy are organic molecules that have been illuminated by nearby low-level star formation. Meanwhile, the tints of green are less massive, older visible light stars. Although astronomers have not identified exactly which galaxy collided with the Cartwheel, two of three candidate galaxies can be seen in this image to the bottom left of the ring, one as a neon blob and the other as a green spiral. Previously, scientists believed the ring marked the outermost edge of the galaxy, but the latest GALEX observations detect a faint disk, not visible in this image, that extends to twice the diameter of the ring.
Dissection of a Galaxy
Title
Dissection of a Galaxy
Description
Sometimes, the best way to understand how something works is to take it apart. The same is true for galaxies like NGC 300, which NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has divided into its various parts. NGC 300 is a face-on spiral galaxy located 7.5 million light-years away in the southern constellation Sculptor. This false-color image taken by the infrared array camera on Spitzer readily distinguishes the main star component of the galaxy (blue) from its dusty spiral arms (red). The star distribution peaks strongly in the central bulge where older stars congregate, and tapers off along the arms where younger stars reside. Thanks to Spitzer's unique ability to sense the heat or infrared emission from dust, astronomers can now clearly trace the embedded dust structures within NGC 300's arms. When viewed at visible wavelengths, the galaxy's dust appears as dark lanes, largely overwhelmed by bright starlight. With Spitzer, the dust -- in particular organic compounds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons -- can be seen in vivid detail (red). These organic molecules are produced, along with heavy elements, by the stellar nurseries that pepper the arms. The findings provide a better understanding of spiral galaxy mechanics and, in the future, will help decipher more distant galaxies, whose individual components cannot be resolved. This image was taken on Nov. 21, 2003 and is composed of photographs obtained at four wavelengths: 3.6 microns (blue), 4.5 microns (green), 5.8 microns (orange) and 8 microns (red).
The Universe's First Firewor
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Title
The Universe's First Fireworks
Description
The right panel is an image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of stars and galaxies in the Ursa Major constellation. This infrared image covers a region of space so large that light would take up to 100 million years to travel across it. The left panel is the same image after stars, galaxies and other sources were masked out. The remaining background light is from a period of time when the universe was less than one billion years old, and most likely originated from the universe's very first groups of objects -- either huge stars or voracious black holes. Darker shades in the image on the left correspond to dimmer parts of the background glow, while yellow and white show the brightest light.
Artist's Impression of Massi
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Title
Artist's Impression of Massive Star Cluster
Description
This is an illustration of one of the most massive star clusters within our Milky Way Galaxy. The cluster is ablaze with the glow of 14 rare red supergiant stars. Interspersed among the supergiants are young blue stars. The cluster contains an estimated 20,000 stars and is 20 times more massive than typical clusters in our galaxy. The cluster is located in the direction of the Galaxy's center. Its visible light is obscured by interstellar dust, but infrared telescopes easily detect the cluster's glow. If it could be seen in visible light, it would resemble this illustration. In this perspective we are looking back across the Milky Way, in the direction of the Sun, 18,900 light-years away. The cluster is only 8 to 10 million years old, young enough for astronomers to see most of the red supergiants before they explode as supernovae. One supernova remnant is located in the cluster at far left. In the background at the 12:00 position is a distant region of stars called W 42.
Black Hole Spills Kaleidosco
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Title
Black Hole Spills Kaleidoscope of Color
Description
This new false-colored image from NASA's Hubble, Chandra and Spitzer space telescopes shows a giant jet of particles that has been shot out from the vicinity of a type of supermassive black hole called a quasar. The jet is enormous, stretching across more than 100,000 light-years of space ? a size comparable to our own Milky Way galaxy! Quasars are among the brightest objects in the universe. They consist of supermassive black holes surrounded by turbulent material, which is being heated up as it is dragged toward the black hole. This hot material glows brilliantly, and some of it gets blown off into space in the form of powerful jets. The jet pictured here is streaming out from the first known quasar, called 3C273, discovered in 1963. A kaleidoscope of colors represents the jet's assorted light waves. X-rays, the highest-energy light in the image, are shown at the far left in blue (the black hole itself is well to the left of the image). The X-rays were captured by Chandra. As you move from left to right, the light diminishes in energy, and wavelengths increase in size. Visible light recorded by Hubble is displayed in green, while infrared light caught by Spitzer is red. Areas where visible and infrared light overlap appear yellow.
The (Almost) Invisible After
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Title
The (Almost) Invisible Aftermath of a Massive Star's Death
Description
For the universe's biggest stars, even death is a show. Massive stars typically end their lives in explosive cataclysms, or supernovae, flinging abundant amounts of hot gas and radiation into outer space. Remnants of these dramatic deaths can linger for thousands of years and be easily detected by professional astronomers. However, not all stars like attention. Thirty thousand light-years away in the Cepheus constellation, astronomers think they've found a massive star whose death barely made a peep. Remnants of this shy star's supernova would have gone completely unnoticed if the super-sensitive eyes of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope hadn't accidentally stumbled upon it. These three panels illustrate just how shy this star is. Unlike most supernova remnants, which are detectable at a variety of wavelengths ranging from radio to X-rays, this source only shows up in mid-infrared images taken by Spitzer's Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS). The remnant can be seen as a red-orange blob at the center of the picture. Although the visible-light (left) and near-infrared (middle) images capture the exact same region of space, the source is completely invisible in both pictures. Astronomers suspect that the remnant's elusiveness is due to its location away from our Milky Way galaxy's dusty main disk, which contains most of the galaxy's stars. A supernova is most noticeable when the material expelled during the star's furious death throes violently collides with surrounding dust. Since the shy star sits away from the galaxy's dusty and crowded disk, the hot gas and radiation it flung into space had little surrounding material to crash into. Thus, it is largely invisible at most wavelengths. MIPS did not need dust to see the remnant. The mid-infrared instrument was able to directly detect the oxygen-rich gas from the supernova's explosive death throes. The visible-light (left) image is a three-color composite of data from the California Institute of Technology's Digitized Sky Survey. In this image, light with a wavelength of 0.44 microns is represented as blue, 0.55-micron light is green, and 0.9-micron light is red. The near-infrared (middle) image is a two-color composite of data from Spitzer's infrared array camera. In this image, starlight captured at 4.5 microns is represented in blue, and 8-micron light from dust is green. The far-infrared image (right) combines the infrared array camera data with the multiband imaging photometer data, which show light of 24 microns in red.
Wanted: Galactic Thief Who S
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Title
Wanted: Galactic Thief Who Steals Gas
Description
A big galaxy is stealing gas right off the "back" of its smaller companion in this new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. The stolen gas is hot, but it might eventually cool down to make new stars and planets. The robber galaxy, called 3C 326 North, and its victim, 3C 326 South, are located about a billion light-years away from Earth in the Serpens constellation. They are both called radio galaxies, because the relativistic jets streaming out of their centers give off a great deal of radio waves. Other dots in the picture are foreground stars and background galaxies. When astronomers first collected data on the 3C 326 galaxies with Spitzer's infrared spectrometer, they were surprised to find that 3C 326 North is loaded with an enormous amount of hot gas, called molecular hydrogen gas, which is fuel for stars and planets. They then studied this archived picture taken with Spitzer's infrared array camera and noticed a tail of stars connecting 3C 326 North to 3C 326 South. This tail revealed that the galactic pair are gravitationally tangled and might eventually merge ? and that 3C 326 North must be hoisting gas from its smaller companion. How is 3C 326 stealing the gas? The answer is gravity. The larger 3C 326 North, which is about the same mass as our Milky Way galaxy, has more gravity so the gas from 3C 326 South falls toward it in the same way that water rolls down hill on Earth. Even in space, it seems the bullies are bigger! This image shows infrared light of three wavelengths: 8-micron light is red, 4.5 microns is green, 3.6 microns is blue.
Dusty Death of a Massive Sta
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Title
Dusty Death of a Massive Star
Description
The supernova remnant1E0102.2-7219 (inset) sits next to the nebula N76 in a bright, star-forming region of the Small Magellanic Cloud, a satellite galaxy to our Milky Way galaxy located about 200,000 light-years from Earth. A supernova remnant is made up of the messy bits and pieces of a massive star that exploded, or went supernova. The image on the right shows glowing dust grains in three wavelengths of infrared radiation: 24 microns (red) measured by the multiband imaging photometer aboard NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, and 8.0 microns (green) and 3.6 microns (blue) measured by Spitzer's infrared array camera. The red bubble is a dust envelope around the supernova remnant E0102, which is being heated by the shock wave created in the explosion of the remnant's massive progenitor star some 1,000 years ago. Most of the blue stars are in the Small Magellanic Cloud, though some are in our own galaxy. The close-up of E0102 on the left is a composite of the infrared observations by Spitzer (red), an optical image (0.5 microns) captured by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope (green), and X-ray measurements by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue). The X-ray ring is generated when the reverse shock slams into stellar material that was expelled during the explosion.
Galactic Twin
title
Galactic Twin
description
What would our Milky Way galaxy look like if we could travel outside it and snap a picture? It might look a lot like a new image by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of a spiral galaxy called NGC 7331 - a virtual twin of our Milky Way. The picture shows our twin as never before. Its swirling arms spin outward from a central bulge of light, which is outlined by a ring of actively forming stars."Being inside our galaxy makes it difficult to see what's going on in the center," said Dr. J.D. Smith, a member of the team that observed NGC 7331, and an astronomer at the University of Arizona, Tucson. "By looking at a very similar galaxy, we gain a bird's eye-view of what the entire Milky Way might look like." Such an outside perspective will teach astronomers how our own galaxy, as well as others like it, might have formed and evolved. The latest observations are the first in a large-scale effort to observe 75 nearby galaxies with Spitzer's highly sensitive infrared eyes. Called Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey, the program will combine Spitzer data with that from other ground- and space-based telescopes operating at wavelengths ranging from ultraviolet to radio to create a comprehensive map of the selected galaxies. The program's first target, NGC 7331, was chosen in part for its striking similarities to the Milky Way. While these so-called twin galaxies do not share the same parents, they have many features in common, including number of stars, mass, spiral arm pattern and star-formation rate of a few stars per year. Whether the Milky Way has an inner star-forming ring like that of NGC 7331 is not known. NGC 7331 is located about 50 million light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. The Spitzer image demonstrates the power of the telescope's infrared eyes to dissect galaxies into their various parts. Taken by the telescope's infrared array camera, the false-colored picture readily distinguishes NGC 7331's arms (brownish red), central bulge (blue) and star-forming ring (yellow). The composition of materials making up these regions was also revealed by the Spitzer observations: the central bulge consists primarily of older stars, the ring possesses a large amount of gas and dusty organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which typically glow when illuminated by newborn stars, and the arms contain these same dust grains to a lesser degree. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons are also found on Earth, on burnt toast and in car exhaust among other places. Data from Spitzer's infrared spectrograph instrument were also used to show that the center of NGC 7331 harbors either an unusually high concentration of massive stars, or a moderately active black hole about the same size as the one lurking at the core of our galaxy. *Image Credit*: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI
Towering Infernos
Title
Towering Infernos
Description
This majestic false-color image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows the "mountains" where stars are born. Dubbed "Mountains of Creation" by Spitzer scientists, these towering pillars of cool gas and dust are illuminated at their tips with light from warm, embryonic stars. The new infrared picture is reminiscent of Hubble's iconic visible-light image of the Eagle Nebula (inset), which also features a star-forming region, or nebula, that is being sculpted into pillars by radiation and winds from hot, massive stars. The pillars in the Spitzer image are part of a region called W5, in the Cassiopeia constellation 7,000 light-years away and 50 light-years across. They are more than 10 times in the size of those in the Eagle Nebula (shown to scale here). The Spitzer's view differs from Hubble's because infrared light penetrates dust, whereas visible light is blocked by it. In the Spitzer image, hundreds of forming stars (white/yellow) can seen for the first time inside the central pillar, and dozens inside the tall pillar to the left. Scientists believe these star clusters were triggered into existence by radiation and winds from an "initiator" star more than 10 times the mass of our Sun. This star is not pictured, but the finger-like pillars "point" toward its location above the image frame. The Spitzer picture also reveals stars (blue) a bit older than the ones in the pillar tips in the evacuated areas between the clouds. Scientists believe these stars were born around the same time as the massive initiator star not pictured. A third group of young stars occupies the bright area below the central pillar. It is not known whether these stars formed in a related or separate event. Some of the blue dots are foreground stars that are not members of this nebula. The red color in the Spitzer image represents organic molecules known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. These building blocks of life are often found in star-forming clouds of gas and dust. Like small dust grains, they are heated by the light from the young stars, then emit energy in infrared wavelengths. This image was taken by the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) on Spitzer. It is a 4-color composite of infrared light, showing emissions from wavelengths of 3.6 microns (blue), 4.5 microns (green), 5.8 microns (orange), and 8.0 microns (red).
Missing Host Galaxies Found
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Title
Missing Host Galaxies Found in Infrared
Description
In a collaborative effort between NASA's three Great Observatories, astronomers have solved a cosmic mystery by identifying some of the oldest and most distant black holes. This animation fades between images taken by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope in the field known as the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, or GOODS. In the first picture, observations from Chandra show high-energy emissions believed to trace the presence of supermassive black holes, which power the bright cores of distant galaxies. The mystery emerges in the second image. While most of the black hole candidates observed by Chandra could easily be identified within host galaxies seen by Hubble, several of them, like the one pictured here, show no sign of a galaxy in visible light. The third image, from Spitzer, shows the same region in infrared light. In this image, the otherwise invisible galaxies reappear. These unusually "reddened" objects may be shrouded in dense clouds of obscuring dust, or may be remarkably distant compared to other galaxies in the same field. Additional Spitzer observations later this year should help astronomers determine the nature of these unusual objects.
The Milky Way Center Aglow w
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Title
The Milky Way Center Aglow with Dust
Description
Our Milky Way is a dusty place. So dusty, in fact, that we cannot see the center of the galaxy in visible light. But when NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope set its infrared eyes on the galactic center, it captured this spectacular view. Taken with just one of Spitzer's cameras (at a wavelength of 8 microns), the image highlights the region's exceptionally bright and dusty clouds, lit up by young massive stars. Individual stars can also be seen as tiny dots scattered throughout the dust. The top mosaic shows a portion of the galactic center that stretches across a distance of 760 light-years. Thanks to Spitzer's excellent resolution, the dusty features within the galactic center are seen in unprecedented detail. Four examples are shown in the magnified insets at the bottom. The farthest left box shows a pair of star-forming regions resembling owl-like cosmic eyes. To the left of the "eyes," dark lanes of dust can be seen. This object is probably located in a spiral arm between Earth and the galactic center, in contrast to the following examples, which are all located at the galactic center. The next inset to the right includes the extremely luminous "Quintuplet" stars, a set of five massive stars believed to have buried themselves in cocoons of dust. Just below and to the right of the Quintuplet is the "Pistol" nebula, a bubble of ejected material from the central, massive Pistol star. The finger-like pillars to the left are part of a structure known as "Sickle." They are similar in size and shape to those in the famous picture of the Eagle Nebula taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope. Pillars like these are sculpted out of dense dust clouds by radiation and winds from hot stars. The pillars in the Sickle were likely to have been formed by a cluster of hot stars located to their right but not readily visible here. The third inset highlights a system of long, stringy structures that are seen for the first time near the base of a region known as the "Arched Filaments." These long filaments are about 10 light-years long and less than 1 light-year wide. The bright star-forming regions to the right are some of the brightest in the infrared sky. The final inset to the right shows the center of our galaxy, which is the brightest spot in the entire mosaic. The brightness is a result of dust being heated up by a compact cluster of hot stars. The bright spot also marks the location of a supermassive black hole, around which a rotating ring of gas and dust known as the circumnuclear disk can be seen. This image was taken with Spitzer's Infrared Array Camera (IRAC), using its 8-micron detector. It shows emissions from heated-up molecules in dust clouds called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.
A Shocking Surprise in Steph
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Title
A Shocking Surprise in Stephan's Quintet
Description
This false-color composite image of the Stephan's Quintet galaxy cluster clearly shows one of the largest shock waves ever seen (green arc), produced by one galaxy falling toward another at over a million miles per hour. It is made up of data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and a ground-based telescope in Spain. Four of the five galaxies in this image are involved in a violent collision, which has already stripped most of the hydrogen gas from the interiors of the galaxies. The centers of the galaxies appear as bright yellow-pink knots inside a blue haze of stars, and the galaxy producing all the turmoil, NGC7318b, is the left of two small bright regions in the middle right of the image. One galaxy, the large spiral at the bottom left of the image, is a foreground object and is not associated with the cluster. The titanic shock wave, larger than our own Milky Way galaxy, was detected by the ground-based telescope using visible-light wavelengths. It consists of hot hydrogen gas. As NGC7318b collides with gas spread throughout the cluster, atoms of hydrogen are heated in the shock wave, producing the green glow. Spitzer pointed its infrared spectrograph at the peak of this shock wave (middle of green glow) to learn more about its inner workings. This instrument breaks light apart into its basic components. Data from the instrument are referred to as spectra and are displayed as curving lines that indicate the amount of light coming at each specific wavelength. The Spitzer spectrum showed a strong infrared signature for incredibly turbulent gas made up of hydrogen molecules. This gas is caused when atoms of hydrogen rapidly pair-up to form molecules in the wake of the shock wave. Molecular hydrogen, unlike atomic hydrogen, gives off most of its energy through vibrations that emit in the infrared. This highly disturbed gas is the most turbulent molecular hydrogen ever seen. Astronomers were surprised not only by the turbulence of the gas, but by the incredible strength of the emission. The reason the molecular hydrogen emission is so powerful is not yet completely understood. Stephan's Quintet is located 300 million light-years away in the Pegasus constellation. This image is composed of three data sets: near-infrared light (blue) and visible light called H-alpha (green) from the Calar Alto Observatory in Spain, operated by the Max Planck Institute in Germany, and 8-micron infrared light (red) from Spitzer's infrared array camera.
'Galactic Ghoul' Rears Its S
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Title
'Galactic Ghoul' Rears Its Spooky Head
Description
A "monster" lurking behind a blanket of cosmic dust is unveiled in this new Halloween image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Resembling a ghoul with two hollow eyes and a screaming mouth, this masked cloud of newborn stars was uncovered by Spitzer's heat-seeking infrared eyes. The spooky cloud -- a nebula called "DR 6" residing in the plane of our Milky Way galaxy -- is home to a cluster of about 10 massive newborn stars, ranging in size from 10 to 20 times the mass of our Sun. The nebular "eyes" and "mouth" were carved out by intense heat and winds, which shoot outward from the stars (located in the central bar or "nose"). The green material remaining in the eyes and mouth is comprised of gas, while the red regions and tendrils beyond make up the dusty cloud that originally gave birth to the young stars. Within the nebula's nose, a second generation of stars is in the process of forming. These stars, in turn, will sculpt their stellar nursery, and ultimately affect the birth of yet another generation of stars. Spitzer provides astronomers with an unprecedented combination of sensitivity and spatial resolution to study this cycle in detail. DR 6 is located 3,900 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus. The distance from one end of its central bar to the other is the about 3.5 light-years, or about the same distance from our Sun to its nearest neighbor, Alpha Centauri. This image composite was taken on Nov. 27, 2003, by Spitzer's infrared array camera. It is composed of images obtained at four wavelengths: 3.6 microns (blue), 4.5 microns (green), 5.8 microns (orange) and 8 microns (red).
Stellar 'Incubators' Seen Co
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Title
Stellar 'Incubators' Seen Cooking up Stars
Description
This image composite compares visible-light and infrared views from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of the glowing Trifid Nebula, a giant star-forming cloud of gas and dust located 5,400 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Visible-light images of the Trifid taken with NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, Baltimore, Md. (inside left) and the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, Tucson, Ariz., (outside left) show a murky cloud lined with dark trails of dust. Data of this same region from the Institute for Radioastronomy millimeter telescope in Spain revealed four dense knots, or cores, of dust (outlined by yellow circles), which are "incubators" for embryonic stars. Astronomers thought these cores were not yet ripe for stars, until Spitzer spotted the warmth of rapidly growing massive embryos tucked inside. These embryos are indicated with arrows in the false-color Spitzer picture (right), taken by the telescope's infrared array camera. The same embryos cannot be seen in the visible-light pictures (left). Spitzer found clusters of embryos in two of the cores and only single embryos in the other two. This is one of the first times that multiple embryos have been observed in individual cores at this early stage of stellar development.
Infrared Detective to the Re
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Title
Infrared Detective to the Rescue
Description
In a collaborative effort between NASA's three Great Observatories, astronomers have solved a cosmic mystery by identifying some of the oldest and most distant black holes. The two rows of this image show two patches of sky, both contained within the field known as the Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey, or GOODS. In the first column, observations from the Chandra X-ray Observatory show high-energy emissions believed to trace the presence of supermassive black holes, which power the bright cores of distant galaxies. The mystery emerges in the second column. While most of the black hole candidates observed by Chandra could easily be identified within host galaxies seen by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, several of them, like the two pictured here, showed no sign of a galaxy in visible light. The images in the third column, from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, show the same region in infrared light. In these images, the otherwise invisible galaxies reappear. These unusually "reddened" objects may be shrouded in dense clouds of obscuring dust, or may be remarkably distant compared to other galaxies in the same field. Additional Spitzer observations later this year should help astronomers determine the nature of these unusual objects.
Hubble Maps the Cosmic Web o
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Title
Hubble Maps the Cosmic Web of "Clumpy" Dark Matter in 3-D
General Information
What is an American Astronomical Society Meeting release? A major news announcement issued at an American Astronomical Society meeting, the premier astronomy conference. An international team of astronomers using NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has created a three-dimensional map that provides the first direct look at the large-scale distribution of dark matter in the universe. Read more: * NASA Press Release [ http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/01/text/ ] * The Full Story [ http://hubblesite.org/newscenter/archive/releases/2007/01/full/ ]
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