Pitch black: Cosmic clumps cast the darkest shadows

(Phys.org) —Astronomers have found cosmic clumps so dark, dense and dusty that they throw the deepest shadows ever recorded. Infrared observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope of these blackest-of-black regions paradoxically ...

Image: Spitzer's Orion

(Phys.org) —Few cosmic vistas excite the imagination like the Orion Nebula, an immense stellar nursery some 1,500 light-years away.

Stormy stars? Spitzer probes weather on brown dwarfs

(Phys.org) —Swirling, stormy clouds may be ever-present on cool celestial orbs called brown dwarfs. New observations from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that most brown dwarfs are roiling with one or more planet-size ...

How engineers revamped Spitzer to probe exoplanets

(Phys.org) —Now approaching its 10th anniversary, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has evolved into a premier observatory for an endeavor not envisioned in its original design: the study of worlds around other stars, called ...

Galaxy winds

(Phys.org) —The most luminous galaxies in our universe are not particularly bright in the visible. Most of their energy output (which can be hundreds or even thousands of times more than our Milky Way's) is emitted at infrared ...

Coldest brown dwarfs blur lines between stars and planets

(Phys.org) —Astronomers are constantly on the hunt for ever-colder star-like bodies, and two years ago a new class of such objects was discovered by researchers using NASA's WISE space telescope. However, until now no one ...

Spitzer telescope celebrates ten years in space

(Phys.org) —Ten years after a Delta II rocket launched NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, lighting up the night sky over Cape Canaveral, Fla., the fourth of the agency's four Great Observatories continues to illuminate the ...

Catalogs of distant, faint sources dark fields [rejected]

Over the past decade, the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) and other modern, giant telescopes have opened a new era in observational cosmology. By staring for long times at so-called "dark fields"—regions of the sky without ...

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