One year ago, astronomers announced the discovery that seven roughly Earth-sized worlds orbited around the nearby star TRAPPIST-1. Now a year later, additional data have refined our understanding of these planets.We now know more about the TRAP
This artist's concept animation shows a brown dwarf with bands of clouds, thought to resemble those seen on Neptune and the other outer planets in the solar system.
May 3rd, 2017 marks the 5,000th day of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope mission. This video gives us a detailed look at six of these days, showing how an automated observatory like Spitzer, which is effectively an astronomy robot, spends its time
Welcome home! This is our Milky Way galaxy as you’ve never seen it before. Ten years in the making, this is the clearest infrared panorama of our galactic home ever made, courtesy of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.
Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have detected what they believe is an alien world just two-thirds the size of Earth - one of the smallest on record!
Over the last half century this Cygnus X has been yielding its secrets to the scrutiny of infrared observations. NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has now provided the best view yet of what we now know is one of the largest single areas of star fo
Hiding behind the constellations Sagittarius and Scorpius is the center of our own Milky Way galaxy, over 25,000 light years away. This patch of sky is mostly dark in visible light, shrouded by dust clouds that lie between us and the Galactic c
Seen here in visible light, the North America Nebula strangely resembles its namesake continent. Expanding our view to include infrared light, the dark dust lanes and concealed stars glow in red colors while the continental gas clouds shift to
While astronomers have identified over 500 planets around other stars, they’re all too small and distant to fill even a single pixel in our most powerful telescopes. That’s why science must rely on art to help us imagine these strange new world
Today's telescopes study the sky across the electromagnetic spectrum. Each part of the spectrum tells us different things about the Universe, giving us more pieces of the cosmic jigsaw puzzle. The most powerful telescopes on the ground and in s
Hidden behind a dark veil of dust in the constellation Sagittarius, a lurking dragon has been revealed by the infrared eye of NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. It gives us a glimpse into how spiral arms affect the formation of stars.
In December of 2009, NASA launched its latest infrared telescope, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer. This satellite, also known as WISE, is on a mission to map the entire sky in infrared light.
In May of 2009, the European Space Agency successfully launched the Herschel Space Observatory, a new eye for the infrared universe. Its 3.5 meter mirror lets us see into the far infrared spectrum with unprecedented clarity.
A supernova flash echoing through surrounding dust clouds has given astronomers a virtual time machine for studying the light from the explosion that nobody saw.