The Hottest Photos from WISE

This image highlights the dust that speckles the Andromeda galaxy -- our nearest large galaxy neighbor. The warm dust, which is heated by newborn stars, traces spidery arms all the way to the center of Andromeda.
This image highlights the dust that speckles the Andromeda galaxy -- our nearest large galaxy neighbor. The warm dust, which is heated by newborn stars, traces spidery arms all the way to the center of Andromeda.
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The spiral beauty, called IC 342 and sometimes Hidden galaxy, is shrouded behind our Milky Way galaxy's bright band of stars, dust and gas. WISE's infrared vision cuts through this veil, offering a crisp view.
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This image shows a cosmic rosebud blossoming with new stars. The stars, called the Berkeley 59 cluster, are the blue dots to the right of the image center. They are ripening out of the dust cloud from which they formed, and at just a few million years old, are young on stellar time scales.
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This is a view of the star-forming region IC 1795, located within the constellation Cassiopeia. This region appears dark and relatively devoid of stars in photographs taken in visible light, due to obscuring dust. The same dust glows brightly in the infrared images obtained by WISE.
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This cosmic cloud, known as the Soul nebula, is one of many sites of star formation within the Milky Way galaxy. It is located 3,800 light-years away from Earth and is nearly 240 light-years across.
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This image shows the famous Pleiades cluster of stars, also known as the Seven Sisters, as seen through the eyes of WISE. The Pleiades are an open cluster of stars, meaning they are loosely bound to each other and will eventually, after a few hundred million years, go their separate ways.
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The red circle visible in the image is SN 1572, also known as Tycho's supernova remnant. When the star exploded, it sent a blast wave into the surrounding material, scooping up interstellar dust and gas as it went. The light captured by WISE in this view is from dust heated by the shock wave.
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A comet like this one spends most of its long life in the darkest, coldest parts of our solar system. It heats up as it approaches the sun, shedding ices and dust in a long tail. Comet Siding Spring, having experienced this warm awakening, is glowing in infrared light that WISE can see.
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The red dot near the center of this image is the first near-Earth asteroid discovered by WISE. This particular asteroid, 2010 AB78, is roughly one kilometer (0.6 miles) in diameter, and is about 158 million kilometers (98 million miles) away from Earth. Its path will not intersect with Earth.
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This colorful image is a view of an area of the sky more than 12 times the size of our full moon. Two types of star clusters are visible -- a wispy nebula and a globular star cluster.
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Some might see a blood-red jellyfish in a forest of seaweed, while others might see a big, red eye or a pair of lips. In fact, the red object in this infrared image is a sphere of stellar innards, blown out from a humongous star.
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This flower-shaped nebula, NGC 2237, is a huge star-forming cloud of dust and gas in our Milky Way galaxy. Estimates of the nebula's distance vary from 4,500 to 5,000 light-years away.
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This image, taken with an infrared camera on Earth, shows the WISE principal investigator, Edward Wright, or Ned, from UCLA. The hottest spots on Ned appear white, and the coolest, purple. WISE's infrared camera also senses the heat of objects.
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