NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured an image revealing different stages of development of stars, right from dusty little tots to young adults.
This cosmic community, coined as the North American nebula, resembles the North American continent when viewed in visible light. However, under Spitzer's infrared view, the continent disappears and instead a swirling landscape of dust and young stars can be seen.
One of the things that make me so excited about this image is how different it is from the visible image, and how much more we can see in the infrared than in the visible, said Luisa Rebull of NASA's Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in a statement.
Over 2,000 new stars have been identified by the Spitzer Science Center team. The new image reveals the various development stages of the stars, from the early years when it is swaddled in dust to early adulthood, when it has become a young parent to a family of developing planets.
With the help of the image, Rebull and his team are now clearly able to distinguish between the young stars in the complex and the older ones. However, the exact distance of the nebula from the earth remains a mystery.
In this image, NASA states how the appearance of the North American nebula can change dramatically using different combinations of visible and infrared observations from the Digitized Sky Survey and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, respectively.
The view at upper right includes both visible and infrared observations while the red section towards the right is known as the "Pelican nebula," as it resembles in visible light to a pelican.
In the two images below, only infrared light from Spitzer is shown. Data from the infrared array camera is on the left, and data from both the infrared array camera and the multiband imaging photometer, which sees longer wavelengths, is on the right.
NASAThe image contains data taken by Spitzer's infrared array camera at wavelengths of 3.6 (blue), 4.5 (green), 5.8 and 8.0 (red) microns.
Throughout the image, Clusters of young stars (about one million years old) can be seen apart from the slightly older stars (about three to five million years) that can be seen scattered across the community. The older stars can be particularly seen concentrating near the "head" region of the Pelican nebula, which is located to the right of the North American nebula (upper right portion of this image).
Certain portions of the nebula are still very thick with dust and appear dark even in Spitzer's view.
NASAThe image of the nebula is a combination of both visible and infrared light observations taken by the Digitized Sky Survey and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, respectively.
This new view of the North American nebula combines both visible and infrared light observations, taken by the Digitized Sky Survey and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, respectively, into a single vivid picture.
In this combined view, the visible part of the spectrum from the Digitized Sky Survey is represented in blues and blue-green hues. The Spitzer component contains data from the infrared array camera.
NASAThe Spitzer image contains data from both its infrared array camera and multiband imaging photometer. Light with a wavelength of 3.6 microns has been color-coded blue; 4.5-micron light is blue-green; 5.8-micron and 8.0-micron light are green; and 24-micron light is red.The Spitzer image contains data from both its infrared array camera and multiband imaging photometer. Light with a wavelength of 3.6 microns has been color-coded blue; 4.5-micron light is blue-green; 5.8-micron and 8.0-micron light are green; and 24-micron light is red.
NASA
