Galaxy
Now warmed up to a toasty minus 406 degrees Fahrenheit, NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has produced the first set of photos since running out of liquid coolant in May.
Barred Spiral Galaxy NGC 4145Two of the telescope’s infrared channels are still working well despite the hotter temperature, and they were able to capture this dramatic image of a cloud bursting with stars in the Cygnus region of the Milky Way Galaxy. Infrared imaging lets Spitzer see and look through dust, which appears blue. Young stars can be seen forming beneath dusty blue clouds, and the orange swirls are mainly hot gas.
“The performance of the two short wavelength channels of Spitzer’s infrared array camera is essentially unchanged from what it was before the observatory’s liquid helium was exhausted,†said Doug Hudgins, the Spitzer program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington in a press release. “To put that in perspective, that means Spitzer’s sensitivity at those wavelengths is still roughly the same as a 30-meter ground-based telescope.â€Planetary Nebula NGC 4361
Spitzer took two other photos, the first of a relatively calm galaxy 68 million light-years away, and the second of a dying star called a planetary nebula. The nebula is unusual because it has four jets of ejected material instead of two, suggesting that it might contain two dying stars each with its own double jet.
