The Galactic Beauty of Star Formation universetoday.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from universetoday.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
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IMAGE: The Milky Way is an example of a spiral galaxy. (Created from images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and ALMA.) view more
Credit: HST, VLA, ALMA, Miguel Querejeta
A lot is known about galaxies. We know, for instance, that the stars within them are shaped from a blend of old star dust and molecules suspended in gas. What remains a mystery, however, is the process that leads to these simple elements being pulled together to form a new star.
But now an international team of scientists, including astrophysicists from the University of Bath in the UK and the National Astronomical Observatory (OAN) in Madrid, Spain have taken a significant step towards understanding how a galaxy s gaseous content becomes organised into a new generation of stars.
The Spitzer Space Telescope is one of them. Operated for 16 years before budgetary restraints shut it down, it still orbits the Sun on an Earth-trailing path that lets it slowly drift away from our home planet. Designed to see in the infrared, it observed the Universe from nearby asteroids to galaxies at the edge of the observable Universe billion so of light years away.
It also saw many Giant Molecular Clouds. While these are black to our eyes, they re warm enough (though still very chilly) that they glow in the infrared. And when Spitzer saw them, it
really saw them: