A dusty stellar nursery shines brightly in a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, formerly known as the Space Infrared Telescope Facility
While space buffs and many other people around the world were riveted by the Spirit rover on Mars and caught up in the fresh possibility of sending humans there, NASA's new Spitzer Space Telescope has been quietly going about its business.
This new Spitzer image, released with little fanfare last week, reveals fresh detail in the Tarantula Nebula, a dusty cloud of star birth that other telescopes had not been able to fully pierce. Scientists released Spitzer's first science images in December.
The orbiting observatory sees the universe in heat-sensing infrared. The "colors" it records are not visible to the human eye. Scientists apply visible colors to the infrared data.
The Tarantula Nebula is located in the southern constellation of Dorado, in a nearby galaxy called the Large Magellanic Cloud. In the nebula are hot, young stars up to 100 times more massive than the Sun. They are some of the most massive stars known.
Other telescopic images have showcased the Tarantula's spidery filaments of gas and dust. But they could not see completely through all the dust that surrounds pockets of newborn stars, astronomers said.
"We can now see the details of what's going on inside this active star-forming
region," said Bernhard Brandl, an astronomer at Cornell University and the University
of Leiden, the Netherlands.
Spitzer reveals not just previously hidden stars but also a hollow cavity around
some of them. Intense radiation has blown away the dust near the stars, according
to the observation team.
"You can see a hole in the cloud as if a giant hair dryer blew away all the
gas and dust," said Brandl, who led the observations.
Spitzer is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the California Institute
of Technology.
-- Robert
Roy Britt
Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/B. Brandl (Cornell &
University of Leiden)
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