Spitzer Space Telescope tagged posts

In 2009 a giant star 25 times more massive than the sun simply vanished. OK, it wasn’t quite that simple. It underwent a period of brightening, increasing in luminosity to a million suns, just as if it was ready to explode into a supernova. But then it faded rather than exploding. And when astronomers tried to see the star using the Large Binocular Telescope (LBT), Hubble and the Spitzer space telescope, they couldn’t see anything.

The star, known as N6946-BH1, is now considered a failed supernova. The BH1 in its name is due to the fact that astronomers think the star collapsed to become a black hole rather than triggering a supernova. But that has been conjecture...

Hot Jupiters — giant gas planets that race around their host stars in extremely tight orbits — have become a little bit less mysterious thanks to a new study combining theoretical modeling with observations by the Hubble Space Telescope.

While previous studies mostly focused on individual worlds classified as “hot Jupiters” due to their superficial similarity to the gas giant in our own solar system, the new study is the first to look at a broader population of the st...

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has revealed that some of the Universe’s earliest galaxies were brighter than expected. The excess light is a by-product of the galaxies releasing incredibly high amounts of ionising radiation. The finding offers clues to the cause of the Epoch of Reionisation, a major cosmic event that transformed the universe from being mostly opaque to the brilliant starscape seen today.

Researchers report on observations of some of the first galaxies to form in the universe, less than 1 billion years after the big bang (or a little more than 13 billion years ago)...

The Spider Nebula lies about 10,000 light-years away from Earth and is a site of active star formation. Infrared wavelengths have been assigned visible colors. Light with a wavelength of 1.2 microns, detected by 2MASS, is shown in blue. The Spitzer wavelengths of 3.6 and 4.5 microns are green and red, respectively. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/2MASS

A nebula known as “the Spider” glows fluorescent green in an infrared image from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope and the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS). The Spider, officially named IC 417, lies near a much smaller object NGC 1931. Together, the two are called “The Spider and the Fly” nebulae. Nebulae are clouds of interstellar gas and dust where stars can form.

The Spider, ~10,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Auriga, is clearly a ...