Herschel's daring test: A glimpse of things to come

Herschel opened its 'eyes' on 14 June and the Photoconductor Array Camera and Spectrometer obtained images of M51, 'the whirlpool galaxy' for a first test observation. Scientists obtained images in three colours from the ...

The distant cosmos as seen in the infrared

(Phys.org) —At some stage after its birth in the big bang, the universe began to make galaxies. No one knows exactly when, or how, this occurred. For that matter, astronomers do not know how the lineages of our own Milky ...

The central region of the Milky Way

(PhysOrg.com) -- The center of our Milky Way galaxy is about 27,000 light-years away in the direction of the constellation of Sagittarius. At the very center of the galaxy lies a black hole whose mass is about four million ...

Giant black holes revealed in the nuclei of merging galaxies

Subaru Telescope research team led by Dr. Masatoshi Imanishi at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan sampled many infrared bright, merging galaxies and determined the presence of active supermassive black holes ...

Astronomers Witness a Star Being Born

(PhysOrg.com) -- Astronomers have glimpsed what could be the youngest known star at the very moment it is being born. Not yet fully developed into a true star, the object is in the earliest stages of star formation and has ...

Caltech rocket experiment finds surprising cosmic light

Using an experiment carried into space on a NASA suborbital rocket, astronomers at Caltech and their colleagues have detected a diffuse cosmic glow that appears to represent more light than that produced by known galaxies ...

The fading ghost of a long-dead star

Thin, red veins of energized gas mark the location of one of the larger supernova remnants in the Milky Way galaxy in this image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

Partner galaxies different in new image

(PhysOrg.com) -- NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer has captured a new view of two companion galaxies -- a somewhat tranquil spiral beauty and its rambunctious partner blazing with smoky star formation.

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