Telescopes find evidence for asteroid belt around Vega

(Phys.org)—Astronomers have discovered what appears to be a large asteroid belt around the star Vega, the second brightest star in northern night skies. The scientists used data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the ...

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 ...

A multilayer haze system on Saturn's hexagon

A rich variety of meteorological phenomena takes place in the extensive hydrogen atmosphere of Saturn, a world about 10 times the size of the Earth. They help us to better understand similar features in the Earth's atmosphere. ...

Spitzer sees the light of alien 'super earth'

(Phys.org) -- NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has detected light emanating from a "super-Earth" planet beyond our solar system for the first time. While the planet is not habitable, the detection is a historic step toward ...

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 ...

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.

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