In the world ranking of telescopes, it's usually Hubble or the newly launched Herschel that claim most of the press.
But recently, a smaller and slightly less known NASA telescope has made some important discoveries using infrared vision. And these discoveries, which demonstrate the birth of new stars, could one day make the Spitzer telescope a household name along the same lines as Hubble.
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| The Hubble space telescope in action |
The Spitzer Telescope was launched in 2003 by NASA for just under $US900 million, though in the last six years it hasn't exactly garnered the kind of attention bestowed upon the Hubble telescope with its regular bevy of amazing images that have since infiltrated popular culture.
It's by no means the first young star images the Spitzer has captured. In 2005, it took some brilliant shots of a young star (quasar) in the Draco constellation. And it had the good fortune of detecting some interesting beams of light (80 light years to be exact) coming from the Double Helix nebula, which it also discovered in the Milky Way.
But if you haven't heard of the Spitzer by now, don't worry: its scientific awakening may have just arrived.
For years, scientists have been unable to clearly photograph the inner workings of our own milky way without running into dust fragments and space debris.
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| The Andromeda Galaxy, captured by the Spitzer telescope. Img source: NASA |
In fact, peering into these dense, deep clusters of stars, dust and gas at the centre of our Milky Way using ordinary optical light telescopics has been like searching through the proverbial needle in a haystack.
Out of the hundreds of billions of galaxies that we currently view in the night skies, it's ironically the one most visible and closest to us that continues to defy our expectations into how stars are formed. And perhaps how our solar system got started.
Baby stars or 'young stellar objects', as astronomers prefer to call them, were discovered in Spitzer photographers using a Spitzer spectrograph, which sorts through the confusion of mistaking older stars with the newcomers, in a process that have earth-bound scientists gushing like a new mother.
Each young stellar object is less than a million years old; the equivalent of earth seconds in an ancient universe and a Milky Way galaxy filled with cranky old stars, rebellious adolescents and hulking black holes.