PIA13301: Bright Lights, Green City

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Mission: Spitzer Space Telescope Spacecraft: Spitzer Space Telescope Instrument: IRAC Product Size: 6000 x 6000 pixels (width x height) Produced By: IPAC-Caltech Full-Res TIFF: PIA13301.tif (108 MB) Full-Res JPEG: PIA13301.jpg (6.345 MB)

Click on the image above to download a moderately sized image in JPEG format (possibly reduced in size from original)

Original Caption Released with Image:

Two extremely bright stars illuminate a greenish mist in this and
other images from the new "GLIMPSE360" survey from NASA's Spitzer Space
Telescope. This fog is comprised of hydrogen and carbon compounds called
polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are found right here on
Earth in sooty vehicle exhaust and on charred grills. In space, PAHs
form in the dark clouds that give rise to stars. These molecules provide
astronomers a way to visualize the peripheries of gas clouds and study
their structures in great detail. They are not actually "green;" but are
color coded in these images to let scientists see their glow in
infrared.Strange streaks -- likely dust grains that lined up with
magnetic fields -- distort the star in the top left. The fairly close,
well-studied star GL 490 gleams in the middle right. The new
observations have revealed several small, blobby outflows of gas from
nearby forming stars, which indicate their youth. Such outflows are a
great way to target really young, massive stars in their very earliest,
hard-to-catch stages. This image is a combination of data from
Spitzer and the Two-Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS). The Spitzer data was
taken after Spitzer's liquid coolant ran dry in May 2009, marking the
beginning of its "warm" mission. Light from Spitzer's remaining infrared
channels at 3.6 and 4.5 microns has been represented in green and red,
respectively. 2MASS observations at 2.2 microns are blue.



Image Credit:
NASA/JPL-Caltech/2MASS/SSI/University of Wisconsin
Image Addition Date:
2010-07-28