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Spitzer Telescope Launched
The Spitzer Space Telescope formally the Space Infared Telescope Facility is an infared space observatory launched in 2003. It is the fourth and final of the NASA Great Observatories Program. -
Youngest Star Spotted
The telescope was trained on a core of gas and dust known as L1014 which had previously appeared completely dark to ground-based observations. The Spitzer reveaed a bright red hot spot in the middle of L1014 -
First Stars of the Universe Captured
lso in 2005, astronomers of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center reported that one of Spitzer's earliest images captured the light of the first stars in the universe. An image of a quasar in the Draco constellation, intended only to help calibrate the telescope, was found to contain an infrared glow after the light of known objects was removed. Kashlinsky and Mather are convinced that the numerous blobs in this glow are the light of stars that formed as early as 100 million years after the big ban -
80-light-year-long nebula
Astronomers reported an 80-light-year-long nebula near the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, the Double Helix Nebula, which is twisted into a double spiral shape. This is thought to be evidence of massive magnetic fields generated by the gas disc orbiting the supermassive black hole at the galaxy's center. This nebula was discovered by the Spitzer Space Telescope, and published in the magazine Nature. -
Atmospheric Temperature Mapped
Astronomers successfully mapped the atmospheric temperature of HD 189733 b, thus obtaining the first map of some kind of an extrasolar planet. -
Portrait of the Milky Way
Scientists unveiled the largest, most detailed infrared portrait of the Milky Way, created by stitching together more than 800,000 snapshots, at the 212th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis, Missouri. -
SILICATE TRANSFORMED
Spitzer researchers from Germany, Hungary and the Netherlands found that amorphous silicate was transformed into crystalline form by an outburst from a star. -
The Phoebe Ring discovery
Astronomers published findings of the "Phoebe ring" of Saturn. This ring was found with the telescope; the ring is a huge disc of material extending from 128 to 207 times the radius of Saturn. -
RAINING CRYSTALS
Tiny forsterite crystals might be falling down like rain on to the protostar HOPS-68. This led the team of astronomers to speculate that the bipolar outflow from the young star may be transporting the forsterite crystals from near the star's surface to the chilly outer cloud. -
Bipolar outflows of a Protostar
Such high speeds can only rise if the dust grains are ejected by a bipolar outflow close to the star. Observations are consistent with an astrophysical theory, where it was suggested that bipolar outflows garden or transform the disks of gas and dust that surround protostars by continually ejecting reprocessed, highly heated material from the inner disk, adjacent to the protostar, to regions of the accretion disk further away from the protostar. -
Discovery of a Gas Giant
Spitzer has co-discovered one of the most distant planets ever identified: a gas giant about 13,000 light-years away from Earth.
