NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope tagged posts

Five days before NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope ended its mission on Jan. 30, 2020, scientists used the spacecraft’s infrared camera to take multiple images of a region known as the California Nebula—a fitting target considering the mission’s management and science operations were both based in Southern California at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech. This mosaic is made from those images. It is the final mosaic image taken by Spitzer and one of hundreds the spacecraft captured throughout its lifetime.

Located about 1,000 light-years from Earth, the nebula looks more than a little like the Golden State when viewed by visible-light telescopes: It is...

By using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers have found that the varying glow of brown dwarfs over time can be explained by bands of patchy clouds rotating at different speeds. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Dim objects called brown dwarfs, less massive than the Sun but more massive than Jupiter, have powerful winds and clouds – specifically, hot patchy clouds made of iron droplets and silicate dust. Scientists recently realized these giant clouds can move and thicken or thin surprisingly rapidly, in less than an Earth day, but did not understand why.

Now, researchers have a new model for explaining how clouds move and change shape in brown dwarfs, using insights from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope...