Uploaded September 2010 | Updated September 2026, 1 week ago
facebook.com/ScienceReason ... The Hidden Universe of the Spitzer Space Telescope (Episode 22): The Milky Way Big Picture (Showcase).
Two and a half billion infrared pixels are exposing our own Galaxy in this new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope!
This is the Hidden Universe of the Spitzer Space Telescope, exploring the mysteries of infrared astronomy with your host Dr. Robert Hurt.
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It's the Milky Way as you've never seen it before! Two and a half billion infrared pixels are exposing our own Galaxy in this new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope! Science is all about getting the big picture, but some pictures are definitely bigger than others.
You may have used your computer to make a large panorama yourself by stitching together a few shots from your camera. Depending on the camera the final picture may contain ten or twenty million pixels. Now can you imagine taking over 800,000 images and combining them into a single two-and-a-half billion pixel image?
Two teams of astronomers have not only imagined it... they've used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to make one. And it's online for everyone to explore. Over 50 astronomers have worked on this massive project since the Spitzer mission began. This image combines data from two different legacy projects known as GLIMPSE, headed up by Dr Ed Churchwell and MIPSGAL, led by Dr. Sean Carey.
The picture covers an area of sky as wide as your finger held out at arm's length, and as long as your open arms. That's about 2 by 130 degrees. Though it sounds like a pretty small slice of the sky, it actually captures half of our entire galaxy! Our sun sits a ways out from the Galactic center, so a 130-degree arc takes in most of its area.
And our Milky Way is very thin compared to its diameter, a lot like a CD. So even a 2° wide scan includes most of its disk. The rest of the stars that fill the sky are actually very close to us, filling just a tiny fraction of the disk right around our sun.
A space image this big takes a lot of space to show off. Spitzer unveiled this giant banner, 4 feet tall and 180 feet long, at the 2008 summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis! Since then it's been on display at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.
The GLIMPSE part of the survey includes the shorter infrared wavelengths. At 3.6 and 4.5 microns we see blue stars that, in visible light, are completely hidden by dust. Carbon-based dust molecules show up at 8 microns, represented as green. MIPSGAL contributes the 24-micron component, rendered as red. This is the warm thermal glow from dust clouds heated by nearby stars.
Together these observations give us a pretty complete view of stellar evolution, beginning to end, across our Galaxy. These ubiquitous dark filaments are dust clouds so dense they're opaque even in the infrared. They're dense enough to trigger gravitational collapse and form new stars.
The red dots seen along these filaments are embedded protostars only barely seen at the longest, most transparent infrared wavelengths. Once the stars are fully formed and glowing from the heat of nuclear fusion, they illuminate, warm, and disrupt the surrounding dust, creating these dramatic structures near and far.
The stars eventually drift beyond their birthplaces mixing among their older cousins. This diffuse blue glow shows us the overall distribution of stars throughout the galaxy. Eventually the most massive stars die in supernova explosions. We can see their expanding shock waves rich in newly forged heavy elements that will help form the next generation of dust and stars.
The GLIMPSE-MIPSGAL image is truly a pictorial guide to the past, present, and future of stars throughout our home galaxy. Astronomers will study the data for many years to come, and the observations will be a roadmap to guide future infrared observatories.
If you'd like to explore Spitzer's Milky Way yourself, all 2.5 gigapixels are available on our website. You can download the whole thing in segments, or use one of several web viewers that let you pan and zoom through the image interactively. Take a look; you might find something that no one else has seen!
• http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/
facebook.com/ScienceReason ... The Hidden Universe of the Spitzer Space Telescope (Episode 22): The Milky Way Big Picture (Showcase).
Two and a half billion infrared pixels are exposing our own Galaxy in this new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope!
This is the Hidden Universe of the Spitzer Space Telescope, exploring the mysteries of infrared astronomy with your host Dr. Robert Hurt.
---
Please SUBSCRIBE to Science & Reason:
• youtube.com/Best0fScience
• youtube.com/ScienceTV
• youtube.com/FFreeThinker
• youtube.com/RationalHumanism
---
It's the Milky Way as you've never seen it before! Two and a half billion infrared pixels are exposing our own Galaxy in this new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope! Science is all about getting the big picture, but some pictures are definitely bigger than others.
You may have used your computer to make a large panorama yourself by stitching together a few shots from your camera. Depending on the camera the final picture may contain ten or twenty million pixels. Now can you imagine taking over 800,000 images and combining them into a single two-and-a-half billion pixel image?
Two teams of astronomers have not only imagined it... they've used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to make one. And it's online for everyone to explore. Over 50 astronomers have worked on this massive project since the Spitzer mission began. This image combines data from two different legacy projects known as GLIMPSE, headed up by Dr Ed Churchwell and MIPSGAL, led by Dr. Sean Carey.
The picture covers an area of sky as wide as your finger held out at arm's length, and as long as your open arms. That's about 2 by 130 degrees. Though it sounds like a pretty small slice of the sky, it actually captures half of our entire galaxy! Our sun sits a ways out from the Galactic center, so a 130-degree arc takes in most of its area.
And our Milky Way is very thin compared to its diameter, a lot like a CD. So even a 2° wide scan includes most of its disk. The rest of the stars that fill the sky are actually very close to us, filling just a tiny fraction of the disk right around our sun.
A space image this big takes a lot of space to show off. Spitzer unveiled this giant banner, 4 feet tall and 180 feet long, at the 2008 summer meeting of the American Astronomical Society in St. Louis! Since then it's been on display at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago, and at the Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles.
The GLIMPSE part of the survey includes the shorter infrared wavelengths. At 3.6 and 4.5 microns we see blue stars that, in visible light, are completely hidden by dust. Carbon-based dust molecules show up at 8 microns, represented as green. MIPSGAL contributes the 24-micron component, rendered as red. This is the warm thermal glow from dust clouds heated by nearby stars.
Together these observations give us a pretty complete view of stellar evolution, beginning to end, across our Galaxy. These ubiquitous dark filaments are dust clouds so dense they're opaque even in the infrared. They're dense enough to trigger gravitational collapse and form new stars.
The red dots seen along these filaments are embedded protostars only barely seen at the longest, most transparent infrared wavelengths. Once the stars are fully formed and glowing from the heat of nuclear fusion, they illuminate, warm, and disrupt the surrounding dust, creating these dramatic structures near and far.
The stars eventually drift beyond their birthplaces mixing among their older cousins. This diffuse blue glow shows us the overall distribution of stars throughout the galaxy. Eventually the most massive stars die in supernova explosions. We can see their expanding shock waves rich in newly forged heavy elements that will help form the next generation of dust and stars.
The GLIMPSE-MIPSGAL image is truly a pictorial guide to the past, present, and future of stars throughout our home galaxy. Astronomers will study the data for many years to come, and the observations will be a roadmap to guide future infrared observatories.
If you'd like to explore Spitzer's Milky Way yourself, all 2.5 gigapixels are available on our website. You can download the whole thing in segments, or use one of several web viewers that let you pan and zoom through the image interactively. Take a look; you might find something that no one else has seen!
• http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/
![NASA Astronomy Pictures Of The Day [Week 1/2010]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/RxK2QN1PH70/mqdefault.jpg "NASA Astronomy Pictures Of The Day [Week 1/2010]
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NASA Astronomy Pictures Of The Day [Week 1/2010].
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► A Roll Cloud Over Uruguay
These rare long clouds may form near advancing cold fronts. In particular, a downdraft from an advancing storm front can cause moist warm air to rise, cool below its dew point, and so form a cloud. When this happens uniformly along an extended front, a roll cloud may form. Roll clouds may actually have air circulating along the long horizontal axis of the cloud. A roll cloud is not thought to be able to morph into a tornado.
• Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100105.html
► The Spotty Surface of Betelgeuse
Betelgeuse really is a big star. If placed at the center of our Solar System it would extend to the orbit of Jupiter. But like all stars except the Sun, the red supergiant is so distant it usually appears as a single point of light, even in large telescopes. The intriguing picture shows two, large, bright, star spots. The spots potentially represent enormous convective cells rising from below the supergiants surface. They are bright because theyre hotter than the rest of the surface, but both spots and surface are cooler than the Sun. Betelgeuse is about 600 light-years away.
• Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100106.html
► The Tail of the Small Magellanic Cloud
A satellite galaxy of our Milky Way, the Small Magellanic Cloud is wonder of the southern sky, named for 16th century Portuguese circumnavigator Ferdinand Magellan. Some 200,000 light-years distant in the constellation Tucana, the small irregular galaxys stars, gas, and dust that lie along a bar and extended wing, are familiar in images from optical telescopes.
• Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100107.html
► Andromeda Island Universe
The most distant object easily visible to the eye is M31, the great Andromeda Galaxy some two and a half million light-years away. But without a telescope, even this immense spiral galaxy - spanning over 200,000 light years - appears as a faint, nebulous cloud in the constellation Andromeda. In contrast, details of a bright yellow nucleus and dark winding dust lanes, are revealed in this digital telescopic image. Were these spiral nebulae simply outlying components of our own Milky Way Galaxy or were they instead island universes distant systems of stars comparable to the Milky Way itself?
• Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100109.html
► The Mystery of the Fading Star
Every 27 years Epsilon Aurigae fades, remaining dim for roughly two years before growing bright again. Since the 19th century, astronomers have studied the mystery star, eventually arguing that Epsilon Aur, centered in this telescopic skyview, was actually undergoing a long eclipse by a dark companion object. But the nature of the companion and even the state of bright star itself could not be pinned down by observations.
• Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100108.html
► A Spherule from the Earths Moon
How did this spherule come to be on the Moon? When a meteorite strikes the Moon, the energy of the impact melts some of the splattering rock, a fraction of which might cool into tiny glass beads. Many of these glass beads were present in lunar soil samples returned to Earth by the Apollo missions.
• Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100110.html
► Blue Moon Eclipse
The International Year of Astronomy 2009 ended with a Blue Moon and a partial lunar eclipse, as the second Full Moon of December grazed the Earths shadow on December 31st.
• Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap100102.html
► The Astronaut Who Captured a Satellite
In 1984, high above the Earths surface, an astronaut captured a satellite. It was the second satellite captured that mission.
• Learn more: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/astropix.html
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