European Association for Astronomy Education

Source: NASA

Dozens of newborn stars sprouting jets from their dusty cocoons.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Wisconsin.

New views from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope show blooming stars in our Milky Way galaxy's more barren territories, far from its crowded core.

The images are part of the Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire (Glimpse 360) project, which is mapping the celestial topography of our galaxy. The map and a full, 360-degree view of the Milky Way plane will be available later this year. Anyone with a computer may view the Glimpse images and help catalog features.

We live in a spiral collection of stars that is mostly flat, like a vinyl record, but it has a slight warp. Our solar system is located about two-thirds of the way out from the Milky Way's center, in the Orion Spur, an offshoot of the Perseus spiral arm. Spitzer's infrared observations are allowing researchers to map the shape of the galaxy and its warp with the most precision yet.

While Spitzer and other telescopes have created mosaics of the galaxy's plane looking in the direction of its center before, the region behind us, with its sparse stars and dark skies, is less charted. (read more)

Source: NASA Science News

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope are making weather maps of an exotic class of exoplanets called "hot Jupiters."

Source: NASA Spitzer

Artist's impression of the cosmic distance ladder.
Image credits:NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have announced the most precise measurement yet of the Hubble constant, or the rate at which our universe is stretching apart.

The Hubble constant is named after the astronomer Edwin P. Hubble, who astonished the world in the 1920s by confirming our universe has been expanding since it exploded into being 13.7 billion years ago. In the late 1990s, astronomers discovered the expansion is accelerating, or speeding up over time. Determining the expansion rate is critical for understanding the age and size of the universe.

Unlike NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, which views the cosmos in visible light, Spitzer took advantage of  long-wavelength infrared light to make its new measurement. It improves by a factor of 3 on a similar, seminal study from the Hubble telescope and brings the uncertainty down to 3 percent, a giant leap in accuracy for cosmological measurements. The newly refined value for the Hubble constant is 74.3 ± 2.1 kilometers per second per megaparsec. A megaparsec is roughly 3 million light-years. (read more)

Source: Universe Today

Artist’s concept that shows what astronomers believe
is an alien world just two-thirds the size of Earth.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers have detected what could be one of the smallest exoplanets found so far, just two-thirds the size of Earth. And, cosmically speaking, it’s in our neighborhood, at just 33 light-years away. But this planet, called UCF-1.01, is not a world most Earthlings would enjoy visiting: it likely is covered in magma.

“We have found strong evidence for a very small, very hot and very near planet with the help of the Spitzer Space Telescope,” said Kevin Stevenson from the University of Central Florida in Orlando, lead author of a new paper in The Astrophysical Journal. “Identifying nearby small planets such as UCF-1.01 may one day lead to their characterization using future instruments.” (read more)

Source: NASA Spitzer

The constellation Boötes, dubbed the "Extended Groth Strip."
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/GSFC

The faint, lumpy glow given off by the very first objects in the universe may have been detected with the best precision yet, using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. These faint objects might be wildly massive stars or voracious black holes. They are too far away to be seen individually, but Spitzer has captured new, convincing evidence of what appears to be the collective pattern of their infrared light.

The observations help confirm the first objects were numerous in quantity and furiously burned cosmic fuel. (read more)

Source: NASA Press Release

The Sombrero galaxy is not simply a regular flat disk galaxy of stars as previously believed.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

While some galaxies are rotund and others are slender disks like our spiral Milky Way, new observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope show that the Sombrero galaxy is both. The galaxy, which is a round, elliptical with a thin disk embedded inside, is one of the first known to exhibit characteristics of the two different types. The findings will lead to a better understanding of galaxy evolution, a topic still poorly understood.

"The Sombrero is more complex than previously thought," said Dimitri Gadotti of the European Southern Observatory in Chile and lead author of a new paper on the findings appearing in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. "The only way to understand all we know about this galaxy is to think of it as two galaxies, one inside the other."

The Sombrero galaxy, also known as NGC 4594, is located 28 million light-years away in the constellation Virgo. From our viewpoint on Earth, we can see the thin edge of its flat disk and a central bulge of stars, making it resemble a wide-brimmed hat. Astronomers do not know whether the Sombrero's disk is shaped like a ring or a spiral, but agree it belongs to the disk class.

"Spitzer is helping to unravel secrets behind an object that has been imaged thousands of times," said Sean Carey of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, Calif. "It is intriguing Spitzer can read the fossil record of events that occurred billions of years ago within this beautiful and archetypal galaxy."

Spitzer captures a different view of the galaxy than visible-light telescopes. In visible views, the galaxy appears to be immersed in a glowing halo, which scientists had thought was relatively light and small. With Spitzer's infrared vision, a different view emerges. Spitzer sees old stars through the dust and reveals the halo has the right size and mass to be a giant elliptical galaxy.

While it is tempting to think the giant elliptical swallowed a spiral disk, astronomers say this is highly unlikely because that process would have destroyed the disk structure. Instead, one scenario they propose is that a giant elliptical galaxy was inundated with gas more than nine billion years ago. Early in our universe, networks of gas clouds were common, and they sometimes fed growing galaxies, causing them to bulk up. The gas would have been pulled into the galaxy by gravity, falling into orbit around the center and spinning out into a flat disk. Stars would have formed from the gas in the disk.

"This poses all sorts of questions," said Rubén Sánchez-Janssen from the European Southern Observatory, co-author of the study. "How did such a large disk take shape and survive inside such a massive elliptical? How unusual is such a formation process?"

Researchers say the answers could help them piece together how other galaxies evolve. Another galaxy, called Centaurus A, appears also to be an elliptical galaxy with a disk inside it. But its disk does not contain many stars. Astronomers speculate that Centaurus A could be at an earlier stage of evolution than the Sombrero and might
eventually look similar.

The findings also answer a mystery about the number of globular clusters in the Sombrero galaxy. Globular clusters are spherical nuggets of old stars. Ellipticals typically have a few thousand, while spirals contain a few hundred. The Sombrero has almost 2,000, a number that makes sense now but had puzzled astronomers when they thought it was only a disk galaxy.

For more information about Spitzer, visit:
http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer

Source: ESA News

Baby stars in Orion Nebula.
Credits: ESA/PACS/NASA/JPL-Caltech/IRAM

Astronomers using ESA’s Herschel and NASA’s Spitzer space telescopes have detected surprisingly rapid changes in the brightness of embryonic stars within the well-known Orion Nebula.(read more)

Source: NASA Spitzer

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected little spheres of
carbon, called buckyballs, in the Small Magellanic Cloud.
Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

Astronomers using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have, for the first time, discovered buckyballs in a solid form in space. Prior to this discovery, the microscopic carbon spheres had been found only in gas form.

Formally named buckminsterfullerene, buckyballs are named after their resemblance to the late architect Buckminster Fuller's geodesic domes. They are made up of 60 carbon molecules arranged into a hollow sphere, like a soccer ball. Their unusual structure makes them ideal candidates for electrical and chemical applications on Earth, including superconducting materials, medicines, water purification and armor.

In the latest discovery, scientists using Spitzer detected tiny specks of matter, or particles, consisting of stacked  buckyballs. They found them around a pair of stars called "XX Ophiuchi," 6,500 light-years from Earth. (read more)

Source: NASA Spitzer

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Penn State.

These two infrared images were taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in 2004 and 2009. They show a faint object moving through space together with a dead star called a white dwarf. The object, thought to be a "failed" star, or brown dwarf, is the coldest stellar companion to be directly imaged outside our solar system. (read source)

Source: NASA Science News and NASA News

Artist's impression of comet storm around Eta Corvi. Image credit: NASA.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected signs of icy bodies raining down in an alien solar system. The downpour resembles our own solar system several billion years ago during a period known as the "Late Heavy Bombardment." (read more)

Source: Science Magazine AAAS

Detailed view of the Milky Way's core.
Image credits: NASA/ESA/SSC/ CXC/ STScI

The Milky Way's center houses a supermassive black hole so sleepy that it probably hasn't swallowed a decent meal for years. Yet a growing body of evidence indicates that the now-dormant beast, about as massive as 4 million suns, fueled a firestorm of activity just a few million years ago, including the sustained emission of some of the highest energy radiation in the universe. A new study offers a dramatic explanation for these past fireworks: The sleeping giant woke when a smaller black hole from another galaxy smashed into it.(read more)

Source: NASA/JPL

Split view showing a normal spiral galaxy around our local universe now (left) and when it was young (right).
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI

Galaxies once thought of as voracious tigers are more like grazing cows, according to a new study using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Astronomers have discovered that galaxies in the distant, early universe continuously ingested their star-making fuel over long periods of time. This goes against previous theories that the galaxies devoured their fuel in quick bursts after run-ins with other galaxies. (read more)

Source: NASA-Spitzer

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Toledo

Tiny crystals of a green mineral called olivine are falling down like rain on a burgeoning star, according to observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

This is the first time such crystals have been observed in the dusty clouds of gas that collapse around forming stars. Astronomers are still debating how the crystals got there, but the most likely culprits are jets of gas blasting away from the embryonic star.(read more)

Source: ESA/Hubble Science Release heic1106

Image credit: NASA, ESA, J. Richard (CRAL) and J.-P. Kneib (LAM). Acknowledgement: Marc Postman (STScI)

Using the amplifying power of a cosmic gravitational lens, astronomers have discovered a distant galaxy whose stars  were born unexpectedly early in cosmic history. This result sheds new light on the formation of the first galaxies, as well as on the early evolution of the Universe. (read more)

Source: NASA/Spitzer

COSMOS-AzTEC3, is the most distant known massive "proto-cluster"
of galaxies, lying about 12.6 billion light-years away from Earth.
Image credit: Subaru/NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers have uncovered a burgeoning galactic metropolis, the most distant known in the early universe. This ancient collection of galaxies presumably grew into a modern galaxy cluster similar to the massive ones seen today.

The developing cluster, named COSMOS-AzTEC3, was discovered and characterized by multi-wavelength telescopes, including NASA's Spitzer, Chandra and Hubble space telescopes, and the ground-based W.M. Keck Observatory and Japan's Subaru Telescope.(read more)

Source: NASA/Spitzer-Caltech

This composite graphic encompasses a quarter century of infrared astronomy from space, a world away from Galileo Galilei's eight-power telescope that was the cutting edge of astronomy 400 years ago. The composite recognizes the International Year of Astronomy and celebrates the dramatic progress in our understanding of the universe derived from infrared observations.  It also illustrates some of the contributions from the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) to this progress by way of astronomical data processing, analysis, archiving and dissemination. (read more)