JPL Logo
Image

Life and Death Intermingled

June 5, 2013
In what may look to some like an undersea image of coral and seaweed, a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is showing the birth and death of stars.

In what may look to some like an undersea image of coral and seaweed, a new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is showing the birth and death of stars. In this view, infrared data from Spitzer are green and blue, while longer-wavelength infrared light from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) are red.

The stringy, seaweed-like filaments are the blown out remnants of a star that exploded in a supernova. The billowy clouds seen in pink are sites of massive star formation. Clusters of massive stars can be seen lighting up the clouds, and a bubble carved out from massive stars is seen near the bottom.

This region contains portions of what are known as the W3 and W5 star-forming regions.

In this image, Spitzer's 3.6- and 4.5-micron data are blue and green, respectively, while WISE's 12-micron data are red. The Spitzer data were taken as part of the mission's Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey Extraordinaire 360, or Glimpse 360 project, which is pointing the Spitzer Space Telescope away from the galactic center to complete a full 360-degree scan of the Milky Way plane.

WISE all-sky observations are boosting Spitzer's imaging capabilities by providing the longer-wavelength infrared coverage the mission lost when it ran out of coolant, as planned, in 2009.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at Caltech. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information about Spitzer, visit http://spitzer.caltech.edu and http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer. More information is online at http://www.nasa.gov/wise and http://wise.astro.ucla.edu.

Keep Exploring