The Spitzer Space Telescope peers through dust and clouds and unlocks the heart of our Milky Way galaxy.

Because of its ability to take measurements in infrared light, Spitzer is immune to the view-blocking dust that typically afflicts visible light observations of the central Milky Way.

In this false-color image, old and cool stars show as blue while dust features illuminated by hot, massive stars appear tinted in red. Nascent stars bloom inside bright and dark filamentary clouds while the bright spot in the center is believed to harbor a supermassive black hole.

An area spanning about 890 light-years wide and 640 light-years high is shown in this Spitzer view. Earth, however, sits well away from this region – about 26,000 light-years away along one of the Milky Way’s spiral arms. One light-year is the distance light travels in one year, about 5.8 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers).

-- SPACE.com Staff

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/S. Stolovy (Spitzer Science Center/ Caltech).