|
|
| NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA |
Silicates in Alien Asteroids
This plot of data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescopes shows that asteroid dust around a dead "white dwarf" star contains silicates -- a common mineral on Earth. The data were taken primarily by Spitzer's infrared spectrograph, an instrument that breaks light apart into its basic constituents. The yellow dots show averaged data from the spectrograph, while the orange triangles show older data from Spitzer's infrared array camera. The white dwarf is called GD 40.
To download, choose your preferred resolution and file format below.
"High-Resolution" files will always be the highest resolution and widest
crop available, intended for print. Other resolutions are provided for
convenient on-screen viewing.
Screen-Resolution (750x600) :
JPEG
(120 KB)
Medium-Resolution (1500x12000) :
JPEG
(192 KB)
High-Resolution (3000x2400) :
JPEG
(1.1 MB)
|
Mac TIFF
(664 KB)
| About the Object (1) | | Object name: | GD 40 | | Object type: | Asteroid Dust |
|
About the Data
|
|
Spitzer Data
|
| Image Credit: | NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA | | Release Date: | 2009/01/05 |
|
