The "Christmas Tree Cluster" has been seen sporting a shiny new decoration: an ornament made of newborn stars! But like a gift-wrapped package, these newborn stars are hiding behind thick branches of cosmic dust, only revealed in this spectacular new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Astronomers say this stellar ornament represents the best laboratory to date for studying the physics of star formation.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered some of life's most basic ingredients in the dust swirling around a young star. The ingredients -- gaseous precursors to DNA and protein -- were detected in the star's terrestrial planet zone, a region where rocky planets such as Earth are thought to be born.

Astronomers have at last found inner light! Only, they didn't find it through the typical Earthly methods of meditation, exercise and therapy. Instead, the light was discovered inside our Milky Way galaxy after hours of deep self-reflection with NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

After more than a year of training workshops, writing proposals, observing, and analyzing data, 12 middle and high school science teachers will culminate months of hard work with a booth presentation at astronomy's version of the Olympics, the American Astronomical Society (AAS) meeting, next month in Washington DC.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is bringing new light -- infrared light -- to the study of our dark and mysterious universe. Some of the observatory's most exciting discoveries will be discussed in free public lectures on Thursday, Dec. 8 and Friday, Dec. 9.

When galaxies collide (as our galaxy, the Milky Way, eventually will with the nearby Andromeda galaxy), what happens to matter that gets spun off in the collision's wake?

Planets are everywhere these days. They have been spotted around more than 150 stars, and evidence is growing that they also circle "failed," or miniature, stars called brown dwarfs. Now, astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope say they have found what may be planets-in-the-making in the strangest of places -- around a brown dwarf that itself is the size of a planet.

How many stars are currently forming in our Milky Way galaxy? How many of them are high-mass stars? These are questions a team of international astronomers will attempt to answer in a 417-hour galactic survey called MIPSGAL. Data from the project's first 200 hours of observations were just recently released to the astronomical community.

Located 1,000 light-years from Earth in the constellation Perseus, a reflection nebula called NGC 1333 epitomizes the beautiful chaos of a dense group of stars being born. Most of the visible light from the young stars in this region is obscured by the dense, dusty cloud in which they formed. With NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists can detect the infrared light from these objects. This allows a look through the dust to gain a more detailed understanding of how stars like our sun begin their lives.

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics

A new image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope reveals billowing mountains of dust ablaze with the fires of stellar youth.

It's another sunny Tuesday morning in Southern California and a handful of infrared scientists have flocked to the roof of the Spitzer Science Center for this week's "First Seven Minutes" meeting.

Scientists using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope say they have detected light that may be from the earliest objects in the universe. If confirmed, the observation provides a glimpse of an era more than 13 billion years ago when, after the fading embers of the theorized Big Bang gave way to millions of years of pervasive darkness, the universe came alive.

Unsuspecting prey be warned! Hiding in the darkest corner of the constellation Circinus is a gigantic black widow spider waiting for its next meal. For decades, this galactic creepy crawler has remained largely invisible, cunningly escaping visible-light detection. At last, it has finally been caught by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope's dust-piercing, infrared eyes.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has spotted the very beginnings of what might become planets around the puniest of celestial orbs -- brown dwarfs, or "failed stars."

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured a stunning infrared view of Messier 31, the famous spiral galaxy also known as Andromeda.

Before it was discovered that gravity pulled comets across the sky, many peoples and cultures perceived these cosmic objects as bad omens or "big bullies." They were often blamed for plagues and wars on Earth. In movies this image of the bully comet is perpetuated as they are often portrayed as hard chunks of ice barreling towards Earth to aid in the extinction of humanity. Recently, with a little help from NASA'S Deep Impact Mission and the Spitzer Space Telescope, comet Tempel 1 was finally able to reveal the soft and fluffy side of comets, showing that they are more like cotton candy than massive bully boulders.

Two of NASA's Great Observatories, the Spitzer and Hubble Space Telescopes, have teamed up to "weigh" the stars in several distant galaxies. One of these galaxies, among the most distant ever seen, appears to be unusually massive and mature for its place in the young universe.

On August 23 and 25, NASA's Spitzer Spitzer Space Telescope looked toward the recently discovered planet beyond Pluto, identified as 2003UB313. The observations were scheduled after an earlier attempt failed due to an error by the Spitzer project team in processing the request. Spitzer measures the amount of heat given off by planets and other objects, enabling researchers to infer the overall size of the bodies. The results of the recent observations are currently being analyzed.

When Deep Impact smashed into comet Tempel 1 on July 4, 2005, it released the ingredients of our solar system's primordial "soup." Now, astronomers using data from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and Deep Impact have analyzed that soup and begun to come up with a recipe for what makes planets, comets and other bodies in our solar system.

Four days after its launch on August 25, 2003, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope opened its infrared eyes for the first time and immediately performed beyond all expectations by providing the world with one of the deepest infrared images ever taken. Two years later, Spitzer continues to surpass expectations by uncovering a hidden universe teeming with warm stellar embryos, chaotic planet-forming disks, majestic galaxies, hidden black holes, remnants of dead stars, and much more.

National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) scientist Dr. Steve Howell once likened a low mass star in a cataclysmic variable (CV) binary system to an aggrieved partner in a romantic relationship, that will "give, and give, and give some more until it has nothing left to give." In a CV system, the relationship taker is a dead star or, "white dwarf" (WD) which releases energy and light as it wraps itself in its partner's mass and forms a disk of material also known as an accretion disk.

University of Wisconsin, Madison

On August 15, 2005 at approximately 7:11 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope will begin its 10,000th hour of science observations.

Since its launch nearly two years ago, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has taken the public on a journey to the darkest and dustiest places of the cosmos. Its stunning infrared images continue to dazzle us with new views of hidden nebulas and whirling galaxies. Some people might think those images magically arrive from space, while astronomers have a better understanding of the complex process involved in creating Spitzer pictures.

Later this month, the Spitzer Space Telescope will look toward the recently-discovered planet beyond Pluto, an object identified as 2003UB313. After the new object was announced, the Spitzer team discovered that the telescope's previous observations of the object were unsuccessful because of an error in the parameters used to target it. A successful Spitzer detection will determine the object's size. If Spitzer does not see it, astronomers will be able to place a solid upper limit on its size. The object was discovered by Dr. Michael Brown of Caltech, along with Dr. Chad Trujillo of Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, and Dr. David Rabinowitz of Yale University in Connecticut.

Most of the biggest black holes in the universe have been eating cosmic meals behind closed doors -- until now.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has found the ingredients for life all the way back to a time when the universe was a mere youngster.

For the second time, Spitzer Legacy science teams have released their most recent data and value-added projects to the public via the World Wide Web.

Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics