This infrared image of the Dumbbell Nebula (aka Messier 27) was taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope. It’s a planetary nebula surrounding a white dwarf star.
Image Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Harvard-Smithsonian CfA
This image combines data from four space telescopes to create a multi-wavelength view of all that remains of RCW 86, the oldest documented example of a supernova. Chinese astronomers witnessed the event in A. D. 185, recording a “guest star” that remained in the sky for eight months. X-ray images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton Observatory were combined to form the blue and green colors in the image. The X-rays show the interstellar gas that has been heated to millions of degrees by the passage of the shock wave from the supernova. Infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and WISE, Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, shown in yellow and red, reveal dust radiating at a temperature of several hundred degrees below zero, warm by comparison to normal dust in our Milky Way galaxy.
Astronomers were able to determine from the X-ray and Infrared data that the cause of the explosion was a Type Ia supernova. In a Type 1a supernova an otherwise-stable white dwarf or dead star is pushed beyond the brink of stability when a companion star dumps material onto it.
Scientists also used the data to solve another mystery surrounding the remnant: how it got to be so large in such a short amount of time. By blowing away wind prior to exploding, the white dwarf was able to clear out a huge cavity, a region of very low-density surrounding the system. The explosion into this cavity was able to expand much faster than it otherwise would have. This is the first time that this type of cavity has been verified around a white dwarf system prior to explosion. Scientists say the results may have significant implications for theories of white-dwarf binary systems and Type Ia supernovae.
RCW 86 is approximately 8,000 light-years away. At about 85 light-years in diameter, it occupies a region of the sky in the southern constellation of Circinus that covers slightly more of the sky than the full moon.
Image Credit: NASA/ESA
The ring floating in the picture above is the size of a galaxy. In fact, it’s part of the Sombrero Galaxy, one of the largest galaxies in the nearby Virgo Cluster of Galaxies. The dark band of dust that obscures the mid-section of the Sombrero Galaxy in optical light actually glows brightly in infrared light. The digitally enhanced image above shows the infrared glow as recorded by the Spitzer Space Telescope superposed in false-color on an existing image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope in visible light. A visible light image is shown below for comparison. The Sombrero Galaxy, also known as M104, is about 50,000 light years across and roughly 28 million light years away. It can be seen with a small telescope in the direction of the constellation Virgo.
Image Credits: NASA/Spitzer and NASA/Hubble
Video Credit: NASA / JPL
The brain-like blob called PMR 1 has been nicknamed the “Exposed Cranium.” This planetary nebula, located roughly 5,000 light-years away in the Vela constellation, is host to a hot, massive dying star that is rapidly losing its mass. The nebula’s interior, mushy and red in this view, is made up primarily of ionized gas, while its cooler outer consists of glowing hydrogen molecules.
In this infrared image taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope light at wavelengths of 3.6 µm is rendered in blue, 4.5 µm in green, and 8.0 µm in red.
Image Credit: NASA
This infrared image taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope shows where the action is taking place in the ancient galaxy NGC 1291. Although the galaxy is around 12 billion years old, the outer ring (red in this view) is filled with new stars that are forming and heating up the surrounding dust that glows with infrared light.
Image Credit: NASA
The Merope Nebula (aka NGC 1435) is a diffuse reflection nebula in the Pleiades star cluster, surrounding the 4th magnitude star Merope. It appears to be about the size of the full moon. It is illuminated entirely by the star Merope which is embedded in the nebula. The nebula appears blue in visible light photographs because of the fine carbon dust spread throughout the cloud. The false color image above was put together using infrared data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. The visible light image below was taken by an amateur astronomer.
Image Credits: NASA / Karol Masztalerz (CC BY-SA 4.0)
W40 is a nebula that looks like a red butterfly in this infrared image taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope. It’s a nursery for hundreds of baby stars that are born in this giant cloud of gas and dust. The butterfly’s wings are hot gas flowing from the most massive stars in this region.
Image Credit: NASA
Like a spider’s web swirled into a spiral, Galaxy IC 342 appears as a delicate pattern of dust. Captured in infrared light by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, faint starlight gives way to the glowing bright patterns of dust found throughout the galaxy’s disk. IC 342 is relatively close by galactic standards, only about 10 million light-years away, however our vantage point places it directly behind the disk of our own Milky Way. The intervening dust makes it difficult to see in visible light, but infrared light penetrates easily.
IC 342 is nearly face-on to us, giving a clear, top-down view of the structure of its disk. It’s surface appears fairly dim compared to other spiral galaxies, indicating a lower density of stars (seen here as a blue haze). Its dust structures show up much more vividly (red). (The blue dots are stars closer to us in our own Milky Way.) New stars are forming in the disk at a rapid rate. The center glows brightly in the infrared because of an enormous burst of star formation in this tiny region. A small band of dust and gas on either side of the central region is helping to fuel the star formation.
Data from Spitzer’s infrared array camera are shown in blue (3.6 microns), green (4.5 microns) and red (5.8 and 8.0 microns).
Image Credit: NASA
This image combines data from four space telescopes to create a multi-wavelength view of all that remains of RCW 86, the oldest documented example of a supernova. Chinese astronomers witnessed the event in A. D. 185, recording a “guest star” that remained in the sky for eight months. X-ray images from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton Observatory were combined to form the blue and green colors in the image. The X-rays show the interstellar gas that has been heated to millions of degrees by the passage of the shock wave from the supernova. Infrared data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and WISE, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, shown in yellow and red, reveal dust radiating at a temperature of several hundred degrees below zero, warm by comparison to normal dust in our Milky Way galaxy.
Astronomers were able to determine from the X-ray and Infrared data that the cause of the explosion was a Type 1a supernova. In a Type 1a supernova an otherwise-stable white dwarf or dead star is pushed beyond the brink of stability when a companion star dumps material onto it.
Scientists also used the data to solve another mystery surrounding the remnant: how it got to be so large in such a short amount of time. By blowing away wind prior to exploding, the white dwarf was able to clear out a huge cavity, a region of very low-density surrounding the system. The explosion into this cavity was able to expand much faster than it otherwise would have. This is the first time that this type of cavity has been verified around a white dwarf system prior to explosion. Scientists say the results may have significant implications for theories of white-dwarf binary systems and Type Ia supernovae.
RCW 86 is approximately 8,000 light-years away. At about 85 light-years in diameter, it occupies a region of the sky in the southern constellation of Circinus that covers slightly more of the sky than the full moon.
Image Credit: NASA / ESA
This picture was assembled from combined observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and ESO’s Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile. It reveals the throes of stellar birth in an object known as HH 46/47.
HH or Herbig-Haro objects form when particle jets shot out by newborn stars collide with surrounding matter, producing small, bright, nebulous regions. The dynamics within many HH objects are obscured from observation with visible light by the enveloping gas and dust, but the infrared and submillimeter light seen by Spitzer and ALMA, respectively, cuts through the cloud around HH 46/47. (Infrared light has longer wavelengths than what we see with our eyes, and submillimeter wavelengths are longer still.)
In this false-color image the shorter-wavelength light appears blue and longer-wavelength light, red. Blue shows gas energized by the outflowing jets. Green traces a combination of hydrogen gas molecules and dust that follows the boundary of the gas cloud surrounding the young star. The red areas are excited carbon monoxide gas.
Image Credit: NASA / ESO
The image on the left is a visible-light view of the Trifid Nebula. The other three are infrared views taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope. The Trifid Nebula is a large star-forming cloud of gas and dust about 5,400 light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. The false-color Spitzer images allow us to look inside the dark lanes of dust are visible trisecting the nebula in the visible-light picture and see regions of star-forming activity. Spitzer uncovered 30 massive embryonic stars and 120 smaller newborn stars in the nebula. The new stars are visible in the Spitzer images as yellow or red spots.
Image Credit: NASA
These three images of galaxy M81 were taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope in different wavelengths of infrared light.
Image Credit: NASA
The Orion Nebula is a stellar nursery 1,500 light-years from here. This false-color infrared view is about 40 light-years across and was assembled using data from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Looking at the nebula in visible light shows many newly-formed stars. This infrared image also shows the nebula’s many protostars still in the process of formation. They show up in the red areas of the image. One of the red spots along the dark dusty filament to the left is and odd protostar cataloged as HOPS 68. It wasrecently found to have crystals of the silicate mineral olivine within its protostellar envelope.
Image Credit: NASA
Video Credit: NASA
The brain-like blob called PMR 1 has been nicknamed the “Exposed Cranium.” This planetary nebula, located roughly 5,000 light-years away in the Vela constellation, is host to a hot, massive dying star that is rapidly losing its mass. The nebula’s interior, mushy and red in this view, is made up primarily of ionized gas, while its cooler outer consists of glowing hydrogen molecules.
In this infrared image taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope light at wavelengths of 3.6 µm is rendered in blue, 4.5 µm in green, and 8.0 µm in red.
Image Credit: NASA
Video Credit: NASA
Spiral galaxy M101 is enormous, almost twice the size of our own Milky Way at over 170,000 light-years across . Recorded at infrared wavelengths by the Spitzer Space Telescope, this picture shows starlight in blue hues while the galaxy’s dust clouds are in red.
Image Credit: NASA
Video Credit: NASA
Video Credit: NASA
Video Credit: NASA
This reimagines combined x-ray, visible light, and infrared data from the Chandra X-Ray Observatory, the Hubble Space Telescope, and the Spitzer Space Telescope as sound rather than an image.
Video Credit: NASA
NGC 4565 is sometimes called the Needle Galaxy. It’s an edge-on spiral galaxy located about 30 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices (Berenice’s Hair). Its bright yellowish central bulge juts out above impressive dust lanes. Its shape suggested that it is a barred spiral galaxy, and Spitzer Space Telescope data confirmed the presence of a central bar.
Image Credit: ESO
This composite view of the Orion Nebula was assembled using imaged from the Hubble and Spritzer Space Telescopes. Hubble’s visible light and UV images show hydrogen and sulfur that have been ionized but intense UV radiation from a group of massive stars in this star-forming region. Spitzer’s infrared data reveals carbon-rich molecules in the cloud. And both sets of images are filled with a rainbow of dots of stars.
Image Credit: NASA
The Trifid Nebula, aka M20, is easy to find with a small telescope. It’s a well known object in the nebula rich constellation Sagittarius. Visible light pictures show the nebula divided into three parts by dark, obscuring dust lanes, but this infrared image reveals filaments of luminous gas and newborn stars. This false-color view was taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope. The Trifid is about 30 light-years across and around 5,500 light-years away.
Image Credit: NASA