Category: Spitzer

While time travel is seemingly impossible, we can actually look back in time with our telescopes to learn about the conditions of our universe in times past. The Spitzer Space Telescope has found some very dim and distant galaxies located at the edge of our universe that have never been seen before. Approximately 12.5 billion light-years away from Earth, we’re seeing these galaxies as when our universe was just one billion years old. With Spitzer’s infrared capability, astronomers have been able to take infrared portraits and even “weigh” many of these early galaxies. “Understanding the mass and chemical makeup of the universe’s first galaxies and then taking snapshots of galaxies at different ages, gives us a better idea of how gas, dust and metals– the material that went into making our Sun, solar system, and Earth –has changed throughout the Universe’s history,” said Spitzer scientist Dr. Ranga Ram Chary.

Unlike the galaxies of today, Chary says that galaxies living in the one billion year old universe were much more pristine. They were comprised primarily of hydrogen and helium gas and contained less than 10% of the heavier elements we see in the local Universe today, and even on Earth. Astronomers have found these distant galaxies were cosmic “lightweights”, or not very massive compared to mature galaxies we see nearby.

“A few billion years after the big bang, 90 percent of the stars being born were occurring in these types of faint galaxies. By identifying this population, we hope to gain insights into the environments where the universe’s first stars formed,” said Chary.

To find these faint galaxies, astronomers followed the lingering afterglow of gamma ray bursts back to their sources. Astronomers believe gamma ray bursts appear when a very massive star dies and becomes a black hole.

The afterglow occurs when energetic electrons spiral around magnetic fields, and release light. In its explosive death, material shooting out of the massive star smashes into surrounding gas. This violent collision heats nearby gas and energizes its electrons.

Once coordinates of the faint galaxies were determined, Chary’s team then used Spitzer’s supersensitive infrared array camera to snap a picture of the faint galaxy. The amount of light from the galaxies allowed Chary to find the mass of the galaxies.

Original News Source: Spitzer Space Telescope Press Release

A new image released from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope shows a baby star blowing bubbles, just like, I guess, a kid with bubblegum. But let’s see your kid hurl out material hundreds of kilometres a second across light-years of space. Those are some big bubbles.

The infant star is known as HH 46/47, and it’s located about 1,140 light-years from Earth. The star itself is that bright white spot at the middle of the image.

Surrounding the star are two bubbles of material extending out in opposite directions. These bubbles are formed when powerful jets of gas collide with the cloud of gas and dust surrounding the star. The red specks at each end signify hot sulfur and iron gas, where the jets are colliding head on into the gas and dust material.

Astronomers think that young stars accumulate material by gravitationally pulling in gas and dust. This process ends when the star gets large enough to create these jets. Any further material is just blown away into space.

Producing this image was a bit of a technical achievement. The researchers at NASA’s JPL developed an advanced image-processing technique for Spitzer data called Hi-Res deconvolution. The process reduces blurring, and makes the image sharper and clearer. With this technique, astronomers were able to make out the details of HH 46/47, and its surrounding bubbles.

Original Source: NASA/JPL News Release

Out there, in the darkness of space, a galaxy is committing a robbery. The robber, known as 3C 326 North is a galaxy the size of our Milky Way. Its victim contains about half the mass, and that’s going steadily down, because 3C 326 North is stealing some of its gas away.

The galactic interaction was revealed by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. These kinds of interactions are common across the Universe; however, this is one of the clearest examples ever seen. The mass of more than a billion suns is being heated up and siphoned away, from the smaller galaxy to the larger one.

According to Patrick Ogle, a researcher at NASA’s Spitzer Space Center, “this could be an important phase in galaxy mergers that we are just now witnessing.”

Ogle and his collaborators were initially trying to study a set of distant objects called radio galaxies, located about a billion light-years away. These are named for the torrent of radio waves pouring out of the supermassive black holes at the centres of the galaxies. 3C 326 North was just the most extreme of the bunch.

When they studied the interacting pair further, they noticed it had a tail of stars, connecting the two objects together. Here’s Ogle again:

“The galaxy in question appears to be stripping a large quantity of molecular hydrogen from its neighbor and heating it up,” said Ogle. “The supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy is digesting a small fraction of the gas and ejecting it in enormous, relativistic jets millions of light-years long.”

In the near future, the older, larger 3C 326 North will experience a second youth. The stolen gas will give it renewed pockets of star formation. The smaller 3C 326 South will have that youth stolen from it – it’ll no longer be able to form stars on its own. In the far future, the two galaxies may eventually merge, and then all will be forgiven.

Original Source: NASA/JPL/Spitzer News Release

This newly released photograph taken by the Spitzer Space Telescope is of a previously hidden star cluster, revealed now in the infrared spectrum. At visible wavelengths, this cluster, located in the southern portion of the Serpens cloud would be totally obscured by dust. But now, thanks to Spitzer, we can see it for the first time.

The cluster was discovered by Robert Gutermuth and Tyler Bourke, from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. They originally uncovered it using the Spitzer Space Telescope, but they weren’t able to determine whether they were forming a new “family unit”, or whether they were part of an existing cluster. Follow on observations with the Smithsonian’s Submillimeter Array (SMA) let them measure its velocity; the newly discovered clouds are drifting at the same velocity as the rest of the Serpens star-forming cloud.

In the Spitzer image, the newly discovered Serpens South stars are the green, yellow and orange points of light. That black line that runs through the image is actually a dense patch of gas and dust which is currently condensing to form stars. The green areas are hot hydrogen gas. And the wisps of red indicate regions where there are large quantities of organic molecules called polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. You might find similar particles on your barbecue grill, or coming out your car’s exhaust pipe.

The discovery was made as part of the Gould’s Belt Survey. This is a study of all the prominent star-forming regions located within 1,600 light-years of Earth. Photographs from Spitzer as well as several other ground-based telescopes will be merged together into a large data set that astronomers can study for years to come.

Original Source:Centre for Astrophysics

Galaxies aren’t born, they evolve, getting built up through a succession of mergers over billions of years. In most cases, this process is slow and steady, with galaxies tearing apart their satellite neighbours and gaining mass. But in one cosmic collision seen by NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, 4 extremely massive galaxies are coming together at the same time in a cosmic pileup.

These merging galaxies aren’t small either. No, when this collision is all wrapped up, the remaining monster galaxy will have 10 times the mass of our Milky Way – one of the largest galaxies in the entire Universe. We’ll have a taste of this in about 5 billion years, when the Milky Way merges with Andromeda.

Regular mergers are very common across the Universe; it’s how galaxies grow. But this is different. Bigger, more massive, more destructive. Here’s a cool quote from one of the discovering scientists:

“Most of the galaxy mergers we already knew about are like compact cars crashing together,” said Kenneth Rines of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, Mass. “What we have here is like four sand trucks smashing together, flinging sand everywhere.”

It’s inevitable that the most massive galaxies in the Universe will collide and merge too, they’ve just never been seen before.

Galaxy collisions are one of the events that can ignite star formation. The gravitational interaction between galaxies causes clouds of gas and dust to collapse, creating new stellar nurseries. But that won’t happen here. Spitzer didn’t see large quantities of gas, and hot, young star formation; only old stars.

Original Source:NASA News Release

The latest image released from the Spitzer Space Telescope shows infant stars “hatching” in the head of Orion. Astronomers think that a supernova 3 million years ago sent shockwaves through the region, collapsing clouds of gas and dust, and beginning a new generation of star formation.

The region imaged by Spitzer is called Barnard 30, located about 1,300 light-years from Earth in the constellation of Orion. More specifically, it’s located right beside the star considered to be Orion’s head, Lambda Orionis.

Since the region is shrouded in dark clouds of gas and dust that obscure visible light images, this was an ideal target for Spitzer, which can peer right through them in the infrared spectrum. The tints of orange-red glow are dust particles warmed by the newly forming stars. The reddish-pink dots are the young stars themselves, embedded in the clouds of gas and dust.

Original Source: Spitzer News Release