Astronomy News

Astronomers have come across what appear to be two of the earliest and most primitive supermassive black holes known.

Astronomers have used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope rather like a doctor's stethoscope to listen in on the "heartbeat" of star formation in our galaxy, a finding that will help trace the "life" of the Milky Way and other galaxies.

Imagine finding a living dinosaur in your backyard. Astronomers have found the astronomical equivalent of prehistoric life in our intergalactic backyard: a group of small, ancient galaxies that has waited 10 billion years to come together. These "late bloomers" are on their way to building a large elliptical galaxy.

Artwork inspired by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope is making an appearance at this year's Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has captured an action-packed picture of the nearby Small Magellanic Cloud, a small galaxy that looks like a wispy cloud when seen from Earth.

For almost two centuries, humans have looked up at a bright star called Epsilon Aurigae and watched with their own eyes as it seemed to disappear into the night sky, slowly fading before coming back to life again.

This composite graphic encompasses a quarter century of infrared astronomy from space, a world away from Galileo Galilei's eight-power telescope that was the cutting edge of astronomy 400 years ago. It also illustrates some of the contributions from the Infrared Processing and Analysis Center (IPAC) to this progress by way of astronomical data processing, analysis, archiving and dissemination.

In an unveiling of truly galactic proportions, the world's largest image of our Milky Way galaxy, taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, will be unveiled at the Adler Planetarium in Chicago.