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Hubble isn't the only telescope. In fact its successor James Webb Space Telescope should be ready to launch next year.

Chris Gunn explains that

ESA's Herschel Space Observatory studied the cosmos in infrared. It was decommissioned in 2003 when the coolant ran out and it could no longer operate.

The Herschel Space Observatory was named in honor of William Herschel who discovered infrared radiation, and his sister Caroline who worked with him. What's infrared? Who launched the telescope? What did we learn from it? Find out in Astronomy ABC - H for Herschel Space Observatory

The Herschel Space Observatory didn't go into space alone. ESA launched it along with the Planck Space Observatory.

Planck's job was to map at high resolution that cosmic microwave background (CMB). This is radiation that permeates the Universe, left over from the extremely early Universe. Planck's measurements have provided data to help test theories of, for example, the early Universe and the origin of galaxies.

Artist's impression of the Planck spacecraft (Image credit: ESA/AOES Medialab)

NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory views the cosmos through radiation at the opposite end of the spectrum to Herschel, James Webb and Planck. While they're looking at cold phenomena with longer waves, Chandra detects hot and energetic events that produce short waves.

The Hubble view of M51 is a real beauty, isn't it? "Long lanes of stars and gas laced with dust" form the spiral arms. M51 is interacting with a companion galaxy which you can see in the upper left of the image. The companion's gravitational influence is triggering star formation in the Whirlpool, as seen by the numerous clusters of bright, young stars (red). (Credit: NASA/ESA/S. Beckwith & Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA))

The Herschel Space Observatory image isn't showing stars in the spiral arms. It's detecting the dust in the arms. In the color-coding used here, blue represents warmer regions and red shows cooler regions. The blue blobs in the arms are star-forming regions where the young stars are heating up the dust. The companion galaxy is being affected by the gravitational stress of merging with M51. Its bright blue color shows that star formation has been triggered in the encounter.

Here is Chandra's X-ray view of M51 which also includes optical data from Hubble. All the purple stuff is X-rays. The fuzzy purple areas show gas that's been superheated by supernova explosions. Most the bright dots of purple light are binary stars, containing either a neutron star or black hole orbiting a sunlike star. (Neutron stars and black holes are the remnants of the cores of massive stars that have exploded as supernovae.)

This Herschel image of the Eagle Nebula is a composite using three colors. Herschel was an infrared telescope which is why it was able to penetrate layers of dust to see what was inside a secluded stellar nursery. Since our eyes can't see in infrared, each color represents a different infrared wavelength.

In 1995 the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s image of the Eagle Nebula became one of the iconic images of the 20th Century. That image showed the pillars, being gradually eaten away by ultraviolet light from nearby stars. The tips of the pillars were also found to contain star forming regions, which are known as EGGS (Evaporating Gaseous Globules). Herschel’s image shows the ‘Pillars of Creation’ - the circle on the picture outlines it.

ESA/PACS& SPIRE Consortium, Tracey Hill, Frédérique Motte, Laboratoire AIM
Paris - Saclay, CEA/IRFU - CNRS/INSU - Uni. Paris Diderot, HOBYS Key Programme
Consortia

image of the Eagle Nebula

Beautiful as always.

This startling image of the Polaris Flare is made from data collected by ESA's Planck mission.

In this view of the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) from ESA’s Herschel space observatory, cool lanes of forming stars are revealed in fine detail.

Sensitive to the far-infrared light from cool dust mixed in with gas, Herschel seeks out clouds of gas where stars are born. This image reveals some of the very coldest dust in the galaxy – only a few tens of degrees above absolute zero – colored red in this image.

By comparison, warmer regions such as the densely populated central bulge, home to older stars, take on a blue appearance.

Intricate structure is present throughout the 200,000 light-year-wide galaxy with star-formation zones organized in spiral arms and at least five concentric rings, interspersed with dark gaps where star formation is absent.

Host to several hundred billion stars, this new image of Andromeda clearly shows that many more stars will soon spark into existence.

Credits: ESA/PACS & SPIRE Consortium, O. Krause, HSC, H. Linz.

This image from ESA's Herschel Space Observatory shows a giant star nursery in the constellation Vulpecula (the Fox)


Credit: ESA/PACS & SPIRE Consortium, Sergio Molinari, Hi-GAL Project

Yesterday was the 14th anniversary of the launch of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. [Artist's conception of the telescope against an infrared sky]

It's an infrared telescope whose main mission finished in 2009 when it ran out of the coolant that's needed to keep it at an operating temperature. However one of the instruments is still functioning and continues to provide valuable data. The mission was renamed the Spitzer Warm Mission and redirected to its current capabilities.

The telescope was named in honor of Lyman Spitzer, an astronomer who had promoted the concept of space telescopes in the 1940s.

A startling picture of the Helix Nebula from Spitzer Space Telescope data. The nebula is about 700 light years away in the constellation Aquarius. The white dwarf star is visible in the center - it's what remains of a sunlike star after it ran out of nuclear fuel.


Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Univ.of Ariz.

Three images of the Sculptor Galaxy from the Spitzer Space Telescope during its "cold" mission, i.e., before the coolant ran out. The largest of the three images is a composite of the two smaller ones.

The galaxy is 11.4 million light years away and is a feature of the southern sky. However it can be seen low in the sky in the northern hemisphere - it was discovered in 1783 by Caroline Herschel from the south of England. The Sculptor Galaxy (NGC 253) is a starburst galaxy, i.e., one whose nucleus contains a region of copious star formation.

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Mona, what beautiful spirals.

WISE launched into the morning skies above Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California on Dec. 14, 2009. By early 2011, it had finished scanning the entire sky twice in infrared light, snapping pictures of three-quarters of a billion objects, including remote galaxies, stars and asteroids. Today, astronomers continue to mine a cosmic quarry of data provided by WISE.

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) was launched in December 2009. It was an infrared telescope designed to scan the entire sky twice, imaging three-quarters of a billion objects. In this database of images are some of the the most luminous galaxies in the universe -- incredibly energetic objects bursting with new stars. The infrared telescope can see the glow of dust that shrouds these galaxies, hiding them from visible-light telescopes.

Artist's concept of the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Here is the Blue Horsehead Nebula (IC 4592) in infrared from WISE. In infrared we don't see a horse's head shape. We see "a complex labyrinth of filaments, caverns, and cocoons of glowing dust and gas" which spans about 40 light years. It looks rather like an abstract painting. The nebula is some 400 light years away from us in the constellation Scorpius. The star that is mainly responsible for heating the dust and for illuminating the nebula is Nu Scorpii - it's a reddened star to the left of center in the image.

Image Credit: WISE, IRSA, NASA; Processing & Copyright : Francesco Antonucci

This composite NASA image of the spiral galaxy M81, located about 12 million light years away, includes X-ray data from the Chandra X-ray Observatory (blue), optical data from the Hubble Space Telescope (green), infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope (pink) and ultraviolet data from GALEX (purple). The inset shows a close-up of the Chandra image. At the center of M81 is a supermassive black hole that is about 70 million times more massive than the Sun.

Oooooo that is pretty! It makes one realize just how tiny we are in the universe. And we're only on our planet for the blink of an eye ...

Mona, you know what is interesting - so many beautiful spirals and the Native Americans use spirals also. You see them in the petroglyphs.

Here is Messier 101, the Pinwheel Galaxy, a spectacular spiral galaxy about 25 million light years away in the constellation Ursa Major. Its spiral structure was first seen in the 19th century by Lord Rosse in his telescope known as the Leviathan of Parsonstown. This image is composed of data from space telescopes at different wavelengths and color coded: Chandra X-ray Observatory (purple), the Galaxy Evolution Explorer (blue), Hubble Space Telescope(yellow), and the Spitzer Space Telescope(red). The X-ray data trace the location of multimillion degree gas around M101's exploded stars and neutron star and black hole binary star systems, the lower energy data follow the stars and dust that define M101's grand spiral arms.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC, JPL, Caltech STScI
Text: Robert Nemiroff (MTU) & Jerry Bonnell (UMCP)

The infrared Spitzer Space Telescope had its 15th anniversary a few days ago. Here is an image of the Trifid Nebula (M20) about 5500 light years away in the constellation Sagittarius.

In visible light pictures, you see the nebula divided into three parts by dark dust lines. (This is where its name comes from.) In the infrared there are filaments of glowing dust clouds and newborn stars. These baby stars and embryonic stars are hidden in the dust in visible light images.

Image Credit: J. Rho (SSC/Caltech), JPL-Caltech, NASA

The Very Large Telescope (VLT) doesn't have an imaginative name, but it's a wonderful telescope. It's operated by the European Southern Observatory (ESO). FORS2, an instrument mounted on ESO’s Very Large Telescope captured the spiral galaxy NGC 3981 in all its glory. The image, captured during the ESO Cosmic Gems Programme, showcases the beauty of the southern skies when conditions don’t allow scientific observations to be made.