NASA Wise: Brown Star is discovered to be a close neighbour of our Sun

This image is an artist's conception of the brown dwarf WISE J085510.83-071442.5. 

The Sun is the bright star directly to the right of the brown dwarf. 

Credit: Robert Hurt /JPL, Janella Williams /Penn State University

A "brown dwarf" star that appears to be the coldest of its kind, as frosty as Earth's North Pole, has been discovered by a Penn State University astronomer using NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Spitzer Space Telescopes.

Images from the space telescopes also pinpointed the object's distance at 7.2 light-years away, making it the fourth closest system to our Sun.

Kevin Luhman

"It is very exciting to discover a new neighbor of our solar system that is so close," said Kevin Luhman, an associate professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State and a researcher in the Penn State Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds.

"In addition, its extreme temperature should tell us a lot about the atmospheres of planets, which often have similarly cold temperatures."

Brown dwarfs start their lives like stars, as collapsing balls of gas, but they lack the mass to burn nuclear fuel and radiate starlight.

The newfound coldest brown dwarf, named WISE J085510.83-071442.5, has a chilly temperature between minus 54 and 9 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 48 to minus 13 degrees Celsius).

Previous record holders for coldest brown dwarfs, also found by WISE and Spitzer, were about room temperature.

Although it is very close to our solar system, WISE J085510.83-071442.5 is not an appealing destination for human space travel in the distant future.

"Any planets that might orbit it would be much too cold to support life as we know it" Luhman said.

Add caption

WISE J085510.83-071442.5 was discovered through its rapid motion across the sky in two infrared images the WISE satellite taken six months apart in 2010. 

Two additional images were taken with the Spitzer Space Telescope in 2013 and 2014 to measure its distance via the parallax effect. 

Credit: NASA/JPL/IPAC

NASA WISE Finds Lost Asteroid Family Members

This artist's conception shows how families of asteroids are created.

Over the history of our solar system, catastrophic collisions between asteroids located in the belt between Mars and Jupiter have formed families of objects on similar orbits around the sun. 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have led to a new and improved family tree for asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Astronomers used millions of infrared snapshots from the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE all-sky survey, called NEOWISE, to identify 28 new asteroid families.

The snapshots also helped place thousands of previously hidden and uncategorized asteroids into families for the first time.

The findings are a critical step in understanding the origins of asteroid families, and the collisions thought to have created these rocky clans.

"NEOWISE has given us the data for a much more detailed look at the evolution of asteroids throughout the solar system," said Lindley Johnson, the program executive for the Near-Earth Object Observation Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

"This will help us trace the NEOs back to their sources and understand how some of them have migrated to orbits hazardous to the Earth."

The main asteroid belt is a major source of near-Earth objects (NEOs), which are those asteroids and comets that come within 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) of Earth's path around the sun.

Some near-Earth objects start out in stable orbits in the main asteroid belt, until a collision or gravitational disturbance flings them inward like flippers in a game of pinball.

The NEOWISE team looked at about 120,000 main belt asteroids out of the approximately 600,000 known.

They found that about 38,000 of these objects, roughly one third of the observed population, could be assigned to 76 families, 28 of which are new. In addition, some asteroids thought to belong to a particular family were reclassified.

NASA WISE: Coldest brown dwarfs blur lines between stars and planets

This artist's conception portrays a free-floating brown dwarf, or failed star. 

A new study shows that several of these objects are warmer than previously thought with temperatures about 250-350 degrees Fahrenheit. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Astronomers are constantly on the hunt for ever-colder star-like bodies, and two years ago a new class of such objects was discovered by researchers using NASA's WISE space telescope.

However, until now no one has known exactly how cool their surfaces really are - some evidence suggested they could be room temperature.

A new study shows that while these brown dwarfs, sometimes called failed stars, are indeed the coldest known free-floating celestial bodies, they are warmer than previously thought with temperatures about 250-350 degrees Fahrenheit.

To reach such low surface temperatures after cooling for billions of years means that these objects can only have about 5 to 20 times the mass of Jupiter.

Unlike the Sun, these objects' only source of energy is from their gravitational contraction, which depends directly on their mass.

Trent Dupuy

"If one of these objects was found orbiting a star, there is a good chance that it would be called a planet," says Trent Dupuy, a Hubble Fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

But because they probably formed on their own and not in a proto-planetary disk, astronomers still call these objects brown dwarfs even if they are "planetary mass."

Characterizing these cold brown dwarfs is challenging because they emit most of their light at infrared wavelengths, and they are very faint due to their small size and low temperature.

To get accurate temperatures, astronomers need to know the distances to these objects.

"We wanted to find out if they were colder, fainter, and nearby or if they were warmer, brighter, and more distant," explains Dupuy.

Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, the team determined that the brown dwarfs in question are located at distances 20 to 50 light-years away.

Locations of brown dwarfs: The locations of brown dwarfs discovered by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, and mapped by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, are shown here in this diagram. 

The view is from a vantage point about 100 light-years away from the sun, looking back towards the constellation Orion. 

At this distance our sun is barely visible as a speck of light. The vastly fainter brown dwarfs would not even be visible in this view. The red lines all link back to the location of the sun. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

To determine the distances to these objects the team measured their parallax - the apparent change in position against background stars over time.

As the Spitzer Space Telescope orbits the Sun its perspective changes and nearby objects appear to shift back and forth slightly.

The same effect occurs if you hold up a finger in front of your face and close one eye and then the other. The position of your finger seems to shift when viewed against the distant background.

The new data also present new puzzles to astronomers that study cool, planet-like atmospheres. Unlike warmer brown dwarfs and stars, the observable properties of these objects don't seem to correlate as strongly with temperature.

This suggests increased roles for other factors, such as convective mixing, in driving the chemistry at the surface.

This study examined the initial sample of the coldest brown dwarfs discovered in the WISE survey data.

Additional objects discovered in the past two years remain to be studied and will hopefully shed light on some of these outstanding issues.

NASA WISE mission finds lost asteroid family members

This artist's conception shows how families of asteroids are created. 

Over the history of our solar system, catastrophic collisions between asteroids located in the belt between Mars and Jupiter have formed families of objects on similar orbits around the sun. 

Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have led to a new and improved family tree for asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter.

Astronomers used millions of infrared snapshots from the asteroid-hunting portion of the WISE all-sky survey, called NEOWISE, to identify 28 new asteroid families.

The snapshots also helped place thousands of previously hidden and uncategorized asteroids into families for the first time.

The findings are a critical step in understanding the origins of asteroid families, and the collisions thought to have created these rocky clans.

"NEOWISE has given us the data for a much more detailed look at the evolution of asteroids throughout the solar system," said Lindley Johnson, the program executive for the Near-Earth Object Observation Program at NASA Headquarters in Washington.

"This will help us trace the NEOs back to their sources and understand how some of them have migrated to orbits hazardous to the Earth."

The main asteroid belt is a major source of near-Earth objects (NEOs), which are those asteroids and comets that come within 28 million miles (45 million kilometers) of Earth's path around the sun.

Some near-Earth objects start out in stable orbits in the main asteroid belt, until a collision or gravitational disturbance flings them inward like flippers in a game of pinball.

The NEOWISE team looked at about 120,000 main belt asteroids out of the approximately 600,000 known.

They found that about 38,000 of these objects, roughly one third of the observed population, could be assigned to 76 families, 28 of which are new.

In addition, some asteroids thought to belong to a particular family were reclassified.

An asteroid family is formed when a collision breaks apart a large parent body into fragments of various sizes.

Some collisions leave giant craters. For example, the asteroid Vesta's southern hemisphere was excavated by two large impacts.

Other smash-ups are catastrophic, shattering an object into numerous fragments, as was the case with the Eos asteroid family.

The cast-off pieces move together in packs, traveling on the same path around the sun, but over time the pieces become more and more spread out.

More information: Paper: dx.doi.org/10.1088/0004-637X/770/1/7

When Galaxies Collide: The Starry Night Tango - Video

This simulation, which represents a few billion years of evolution, shows two disk galaxies interacting in a graceful gravitational dance. The color represents the temperature of the gas in the galaxies.

The simulation shows how gravity can rearrange the gas and stars in galaxies during these interaction events, fueling the supermassive black holes at the centers of each galaxy.

Radiation from the energized black holes can heat up the gas and blow it away, causing the outbursts seen in the animation.

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is discovering some of the most active, powerful galaxies known, which in some cases may have been fueled by such mergers.

Video courtesy Volker Springel, Heidelberg University, Germany

The Orion Nebula: The Hearthstone of Creation

The Orion nebula is featured in this sweeping image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. 

The constellation of Orion is prominent in the evening sky throughout the world from about December through April of each year.

The nebula (also catalogued as Messier 42) is located in the sword of Orion, hanging from his famous belt of three stars.

The star cluster embedded in the nebula is visible to the unaided human eye as a single star, with some fuzziness apparent to the most keen-eyed observers. Because of its prominence, cultures all around the world have given special significance to Orion.

The Maya of Mesoamerica envision the lower portion of Orion, his belt and feet (the stars Saiph and Rigel), as being the hearthstones of creation, similar to the triangular three-stone hearth that is at the center of all traditional Maya homes.

The Orion nebula, lying at the center of the triangle, is interpreted by the Maya as the cosmic fire of creation surrounded by smoke.

This metaphor of a cosmic fire of creation is apt. The Orion nebula is an enormous cloud of dust and gas where vast numbers of new stars are being forged.

It is one of the closest sites of star formation to Earth and therefore provides astronomers with the best view of stellar birth in action.

Many other telescopes have been used to study the nebula in detail, finding wonders such as planet-forming disks forming around newly forming stars.

WISE was an all-sky survey giving it the ability to see these sites of star formation in a larger context.

This view spans more than six times the width of the full moon, covering a region nearly 100 light-years across. In it, we see the Orion nebula surrounded by large amounts of interstellar dust, colored green.

Astronomers now realize that the Orion nebula is part of the larger Orion molecular cloud complex, which also includes the Flame nebula.

This complex in our Milky Way galaxy is actively making new stars. It is filled with dust warmed by the light of the new stars within, making the dust glow in infrared light.

Colour in this image represents specific infrared wavelengths. Blue represents light emitted at 3.4-micron wavelengths and cyan (blue-green) represents 4.6 microns, both of which come mainly from hot stars.

Relatively cooler objects, such as the dust of the nebulae, appear green and red. Green represents 12-micron light and red represents 22-micron light.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

NASA Chandra ESA XMM-Newton Image: 185 AD Supernova

NASA has released a multi-wavelength view of RCW 86, the oldest recorded supernova explosion.

The spectacular image, which combines data captured by four telescopes, depicts the celestial event which Chinese astronomers witnessed in 185 AD.

The mysterious phenomenon, termed as "guest star", remained in the sky for eight months, they had noted.

X-ray input from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton Observatory were combined to create blue and green tinges in the visual which was compiled in October 2011.

The X-rays show the interstellar gas heated to millions of degrees by shockwaves triggered by the supernova.

Depicted in yellow and red, the infrared data gathered by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and WISE, Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer shows the dust emanating at a temperature of several hundred degrees below zero. But this trail of dust is still warmer than the normal dust in the Milky Way galaxy.

After analyzing the combined data, experts arrived at the conclusion that the cause of the explosion was a Type Ia supernova which pushed a dead star (or a white dwarf) beyond the brink of stability when another star dumped material onto its surface.

RCW 86 is located 8,000 light-years away from the Earth and has a diameter of about 85 light-years.

NASA WISE Image: Flaming Star Nebula

An image of the Flaming Star Nebula, taken in infrared light by NASA's WISE space telescope.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

The new pictures from WISE — short for Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, which launched on Dec. 14, 2009 — are dramatic, colourful images of interstellar clouds of gas and dust called nebulas.

The first photo depicts a structure known as the Flaming Star Nebula, which is about 1,500 light-years away in the constellation Auriga.

At the nebula's heart is the star AE Aurigae, which appears to be ablaze, hence the name.

AE Aurigae is a so-called runaway star, researchers said. It was likely born in the Trapezium Cluster, in the constellation Orion, but was booted out by a collision with a binary star system about 2.5 million years ago.

The enhanced colours seen in the image represent specific wavelengths of infrared light, which unaided human eyes cannot see. 

Hot stars scattered throughout the nebula show up as blue and cyan. Glowing gas appears green, while heated-up dust is primarily red, researchers said.

NASA WISE: Soul Nebula in the constellation Cassiopeia

This WISE mosaic is of the Soul Nebula (a.k.a. the Embryo Nebula, IC 1848, or W5).

It is an open cluster of stars surrounded by a cloud of dust and gas over 150 light-years across and located about 6,500 light-years from Earth in the constellation Cassiopeia, near the Heart Nebula (partially seen in the WISE image of Maffei 1 & 2).

The cluster of stars, IC 1848, formed about a million years ago from the material of the nebula. Winds and ultraviolet light from these young stars are excavating a cavity in the cloud.

Parts of the cloud that are more dense than their surroundings are being eroded more slowly and form giant towers, or pillars of dust and gas, which all point toward the central star cluster. It’s reminiscent of the landscape of Badlands National Park in South Dakota.

Material at the interior edges of the cavity is also being compressed by the winds and radiation from the star cluster. This triggers new star formation in those areas. The pillars inside the Soul Nebula are each about 10 light-years tall and have stars forming at their tips.

All four infrared detectors aboard WISE were used to make this image. Color is representational: blue and cyan represent infrared light at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is primarily light from stars. Green and red represent light at 12 and 22 microns, which is primarily emission from warm dust.

A note about astronomical names: Many objects in the sky have common names that astronomers will use to reference them. However, many, many more objects in the sky do not have common names and only their entry name in an astronomical catalogue is used.

One of the most prominent astronomical catalogues is the New General Catalogue (NGC) of Nebulae and Clusters of Stars. It was published in the 1880s. So an object with a name like NGC 7380 means that it is the 7,380th entry in the NGC.

Two additional catalogues were published as addendums to the NGC called the Index Catalogues (IC) between 1896 and 1905. The designation of IC 1848 for the Soul Nebula means that it is the 1,848th entry in the Index Catalogues of the NGC.

There are many catalogues of astronomical objects, each with their own purpose, and objects can be listed in more than one catalogue. For example, Dutch Astronomer Gart Westerhout made a catalogue of radio sources in the sky. Entry number five in the catalogue, W5, corresponds to IC 1848, i.e. the Soul Nebula (sometimes called the Embryo Nebula).

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

NASA WISE: Thor's Helmet in Constellation Canis Major

This heroic image from WISE is of a special cloud of dust and gas in the constellation Canis Major catalogued as NGC 2359.

The nebula is more commonly known as Thor's Helmet due to its remarkable resemblance to depictions of the headwear donned by the famed Norse god of thunder and lightning.

Powering Thor’s Helmet is HD 56925, a highly luminous "Wolf-Rayet" star (seen at the centre of the helmet).

These kinds of stars are massive; from 10 to 80 times the mass of our Sun. Such stars are often associated with bright nebulae, many of which appear to be spherical bubbles with the Wolf-Rayet star at the centre.

It is thought that the progenitors of these stars are either red supergiants or luminous blue variable stars, both of which slowly shed matter as they age. Once the star enters its Wolf-Rayet phase its strong, fast stellar wind sweeps up the surrounding debris left by the original star and even gathers up interstellar matter from its environment.

It literally blows a bubble in space. These hot stars become 200,000 times more luminous than the Sun. They flood the nebula with ultraviolet light that ionizes much of the gaseous material leading to the bright emission in visible light. Interactions with a nearby large molecular cloud are thought to have contributed to the more complex shape and curved bow-shock structure of Thor's Helmet.

NGC 2359 was the first Wolf-Rayet nebula to be discovered. Between 1917 and 1919, Francis Pease studied the nebula at the Mt. Wilson observatory in southern California. He described the bright regions of the nebula as matching the descriptions of early observers such as Sir John Herschel (son of the discoverer of infrared light, William Herschel), who saw a bust rather than a helmet.

The object was later found to show nitrogen emission by Edwin Hubble and listed in his 1922 paper, A general study of diffuse galactic nebulae. The object has also been of interest to members of the WISE science team during their careers having been studied by Martin Cohen and the WISE Principal Investigator Ned Wright, who co-authored an article in the March 1980 issue of Sky & Telescope, A bubble in space - The shell of NGC 2359.

Thor's Helmet is about 30 light-years across and its distance from Earth is estimated to be about 15,000 light-years. This image covers an area of sky about 2.5 times the size of the full Moon. All four infrared detectors aboard WISE were used to make this image. Color is representational: blue and cyan represent infrared light at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is dominated by light from stars. Green and red represent light at 12 and 22 microns, which is mostly light from warm dust.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

NASA WISE - Galaxy Messier 74

An asteroid tracking its way across the sky with a beautiful spiral galaxy in the background.

In the centre of this new mosaic image captured by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) is the galaxy Messier 74, with its spiral arms seen face-on.

The bright reddish object moving across the lower right part of the image is the much closer asteroid 3540 Protesilaos, seen at different points in its orbit around the Sun.

WISE observed and detected this previously known asteroid a total of ten times, although only a few of those frames were used in this mosaic.

Also known as NGC 628, the Messier 74 galaxy is between 24.5 and 36 million light-years away, and has a diameter of about 100,000 light-years. It is suspected to have a black hole at its centre, with a mass equal to 10,000 Suns.

It is one of only a handful of known black holes with masses intermediate between the relatively smaller ones that form from collapsing stars and the supermassive black holes millions of times more massive than the sun, which are more typically found at the centers of galaxies.

Although it is called a Messier object, Messier 74 was actually discovered by Pierre Mechain in 1780, who then told his friend Charles Messier about it. As one of the dimmest of all Messier objects, this galaxy is a challenge for amateur astronomers to see in visible light, but the WISE cameras captured it clearly in infrared light.

The colors used in this image represent different wavelengths of infrared radiation. Blue and cyan represent light at 3.4 and 4.6 microns, respectively. These colors show both nearby stars inside the Milky Way Galaxy and the combined light of billions of stars that make up Messier 74.

Green and red represent light from 12 and 22 microns, respectively. These colors show light from cooler objects and material. Dust in star-forming regions in Messier 74 traces its spiral structure. The coolest object in the picture is the asteroid 3540 Protesilaos.

This asteroid was first seen in 1973 by the German astronomer Freimut Börngen, who discovered more than 500 asteroids while he was researching galaxies. At the time that WISE observed 3540 Protesilaos, it was at a distance of 772 million kilometers from Earth (480 million miles, or about 43 light-minutes).

It is classified as a Jupiter Trojan minor planet, which are small rocky bodies that share the same orbit around the Sun as the planet Jupiter. Based on the infrared observations, the WISE team estimates the asteroid to be about 90 kilometers (56 miles) across and to reflect only a few percent of the light that lands on it, which makes it about as dark as coal.

By convention, Trojan asteroids are named after the heroes from the Trojan War. In this case, asteroid 3540 is named after the hero Protesilaos. According to Greek mythology, Protesilaos was the first Greek to set foot on Trojan land during the war. Unfortunately for him, there was a prophecy that the first soldier in the war to step onto land from a battle ship would die. The prophecy quickly came true and Protesilaos was killed by the Trojan hero, Hector.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

NASA WISE: Tycho’s Supernova Remnant

This image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) takes in several interesting objects in the constellation Cassiopeia, none of which are easily seen in visible light.

The red circle visible in the upper left part of the image is SN 1572, often called “Tycho’s Supernova”.

This remnant of a star explosion is named after the astronomer Tycho Brahe, although he was not the only person to observe and record the supernova.

When the supernova first appeared in November 1572, it was as bright as Venus and could be seen in the daytime.

Over the next two years, the supernova dimmed until it could no longer be seen with the naked eye. It wasn’t until the 1950s that the remnants of the supernova could be seen again with the help of telescopes.

When the star exploded, it sent out a blast wave into the surrounding material, scooping up interstellar dust and gas as it went, like a snow plow.

An expanding shock wave traveled into the surroundings and a reverse shock was driven back into toward the remnants of the star. Previous observations by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope indicate that the nature of the light that WISE sees from the supernova remnant is emission from dust heated by the shock wave.

In the center of the image is a star forming nebula of dust and gas, called S175 (in the Sharpless catalog of ionized nebula). This cloud of material is about 3,500 light years away and 35 light-years across. It is being heated by radiation from young hot stars within it, and the dust within the cloud radiates infrared light.

On the left edge of the image, between the Tycho supernova remnant and the very bright star, is an open cluster of stars, King 1, first catalogued by Ivan King, an astronomer at UC Berkeley. This cluster is about 6,000 light-years away, 4 light-years across and is about 2 billion years old.

Also of interest in the lower right of the image is a cluster of very red sources. Almost all of these sources have no counterparts in visible light images, and only some have been catalogued by previous infrared surveys.

There are indications that they may be young stellar objects associated with a dense nebula in the area. Young stellar objects (YSOs) are stars in their earliest stages of life. YSOs are surrounded by an envelope of dust, which would explain the very red color of the sources in this image.

All four infrared detectors aboard WISE were used to make this mosaic. The image spans an area of 1.6 x 1.6 degrees on the sky or about 3 times as wide and high as the full Moon.

Colour is representational: blue and cyan represent infrared light at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is dominated by light from stars. Green and red represent light at 12 and 22 microns, which is mostly light from warm dust.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/WISE Team

NASA WISE Discovers Over 90 Near-Earth Objects

WISE Discovers Over 90 Near-Earth Objects

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, completed its first survey of the entire sky on July 17, 2010. The mission has generated more than one million images so far, of everything from asteroids to distant galaxies.

So far, WISE has observed more than 100,000 asteroids, both known and previously unseen. Most of these space rocks are in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter. However, some are near-Earth objects, asteroids and comets with orbits that pass relatively close to Earth. WISE has discovered more than 90 of these new near-Earth objects.

The infrared telescope is good at spotting comets that orbit far from Earth and has discovered more than a dozen of these so far. WISE's infrared vision also gives it a unique ability to pick up the glow of cool stars, called brown dwarfs, in addition to distant galaxies bursting with light and energy. These galaxies are called ultra-luminous infrared galaxies. WISE can see the brightest of them.

"The WISE all-sky survey is helping us sift through the immense and diverse population of celestial objects," said Hashima Hasan, WISE Program scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. "It's a great example of the high impact science
that's possible from NASA's Explorer Program."

WISE Captures a Cosmic Rose - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

WISE Captures a Cosmic Rose - NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory

A new infrared image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, shows a cosmic rosebud blossoming with new stars.

The stars, called the Berkeley 59 cluster, are the blue dots to the right of the image center. They are ripening out of the dust cloud from which they formed, and at just a few million years old, are young on stellar time scales.

The rosebud-like red glow surrounding the hot, young stars is warm dust heated by the stars. Green "leafy" nebulosity enfolds the cluster, showing the edges of the dense, dusty cloud. This green material is from heated polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, molecules that can be found on Earth in barbecue pits, exhaust pipes and other places where combustion has occurred.

Red sources within the green nebula indicate a second generation of stars forming at the surface of the natal cloud, possibly as a consequence of heating and compression from the younger stars.

A supernova remnant associated with this region, called NGC 7822, indicates that a massive star has already exploded, blowing the cloud open in a "champagne flow" and leaving behind this floral remnant. Blue dots sprinkled throughout are foreground stars in our Milky Way galaxy.

NASA WISE: Images of the Wizard Nebula

This image of the open star cluster NGC 7380, also known as the Wizard Nebula, is a mosaic of images from the WISE mission spanning an area on the sky of about 5 times the size of the full moon.

NGC 7380 is located in the constellation Cepheus about 7,000 light-years from Earth within the Milky Way Galaxy.

The star cluster is embedded in a nebula, which spans some 110 light-years. The stars of NGC 7380 have emerged from this star-forming region in the last 5 million years or so, making it a relatively young cluster.

WISE, the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission, scans the entire sky in infrared light, picking up the glow of hundreds of millions of objects and producing millions of images.

The mission is designed to uncover objects never seen before, including the coolest stars, the universe's most luminous galaxies and some of the darkest near-Earth asteroids and comets.

Its vast catalogues will help answer fundamental questions about the origins of planets, stars and galaxies.

WISE joins two other infrared missions in space -- NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and the Herschel Space Observatory, a European Space Agency mission. WISE is different from these missions in that it will survey the entire sky.

It is designed to cast a wide net to catch all sorts of unseen cosmic treasures, including rare oddities. All four infrared detectors aboard WISE were used to make this image.

NGC 7380 was discovered by Caroline Herschel in 1787. Her brother, William Herschel, discovered infrared light in 1800.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

NASA: Launches WISE - InfraRed Sky-mapping Telescope

NASA Launches WISE - The InfraRed Sky-mapping Telescope

NASA launched a new space observatory Monday to scan the skies for new celestial objects in infrared light.

The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) lifted off atop a Delta II rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California at 9:09 a.m. EDT (1409 GMT) on Monday.

The launch was originally scheduled for Friday, but NASA delayed it to allow engineers to fix a glitch on the rocket's booster steering engine. The issue was resolved and the launch went off seemingly without a hitch.

NASA's new telescope will view the heavens with infrared eyes, which see long-wavelength light that is shrouded from optical lenses. The $320 million spacecraft is designed to survey the entire heavens in about six months, creating an all-sky map of the universe in infrared light.

"The infrared is important to us in astronomy because it shows us where the cool things are in the universe, things much cooler than the sun," said Jon Morse, director of astrophysics at NASA, during a Wednesday briefing. "The universe looks much different in infrared."

NASA WISE: Launched Today at 06.09 am

Image above: An United Launch Alliance Delta II rocket with NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) satellite sits poised ready for launch on its Space Launch Complex-2 launch pad here.

Image credit: Bill Hartenstein, United Launch Alliance

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer is rocketing toward orbit aboard a Delta II launch vehicle after a spectacular early-morning liftoff from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California.

After a smooth countdown, the rocket's main engine and three graphite-epoxy solid-rocket motors roared to life for an on-time liftoff at 6:09 a.m. PST (9:09 a.m. EST).

The WISE spacecraft will circle Earth over the poles, scanning the entire sky one-and-a-half times in nine months. The mission will uncover hidden cosmic objects, including the coolest stars, dark asteroids and the most luminous galaxies.