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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.


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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.
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The bright red glow immediately around it is probably the dust kicked up by colliding comets that survived the death of their stellar host.


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


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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


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Mona, what beautiful spirals.

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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


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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


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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.


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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 ...


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

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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)


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