Like people, galaxies come in different shapes and sizes. There are thin spirals both with and without central bulges of stars, and more rotund ellipticals that are themselves like giant bulges. Scientists have long held that all galaxies except the slender, bulgeless spirals harbor supermassive black holes at their cores. Furthermore, bulges were thought to be required for black holes to grow.

The new Spitzer observations throw this theory into question.
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What superficially resembles a giant moth floating in space is giving astronomers new
insight into the formation and evolution of planetary systems.

This is not your typical flying insect. It has a wingspan of about 22 billion miles (35 billion kilometers). The wing-like structure is actually a planetary dust disk encircling the nearby, young star HD 61005, dubbed "The Moth." Its shape is produced by starlight scattering off dust. The Moth is part of a survey of sun-like stars that astronomers observed with NASA's Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes.
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A team of astronomers, including Leonidas Moustakas of JPL, has discovered a never-before-seen optical alignment in space: a pair of glowing rings, one nestled inside the other like a bull's-eye pattern.

The double-ring pattern is caused by the complex bending of light from two distant galaxies strung directly behind a foreground massive galaxy, like three beads on a string. The so-called double "Einstein ring" was revealed by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.
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Google has announced a new version of Sky in Google Earth at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Austin, Texas. Sky now includes NASA images from the Spitzer Space Telescope, the Galaxy Evolution Explorer and other telescopes. In addition, there are several new features that provide scientists, students and amateur stargazers with new tools to explore millions of stars and galaxies, stay current on sky events, learn basic astronomy concepts, see historical sky maps and much more.
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We all start to party less around middle age, and new studies from NASA's Spitzer and Hubble space telescopes now find that the universe, as a whole, is no exception.

In the first quarter of the universe's lifespan, the cosmic landscape was dominated by violent galaxy mergers, which could radically transform the shape of a galaxy and convert its gas into stars at an extreme rate. More than half of bright galaxies were indulging in such violent "partying." The new research finds all that changed when the universe hit middle age.
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New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and a ground-based telescope suggest that the disks of hot gas that accumulate around a wide variety of astronomical objects -- from degenerate stars in energetic binary systems to supermassive black holes at the hearts of active galaxies -- are likely to be much larger than previously believed.

The discovery was made as part of an educational program called the Spitzer-NOAO Observing Program for Teachers and Students.
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