Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) Image: Southern constellation of Circinus

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), has uncovered a striking population of young stellar objects in a complex of dense, dark clouds in the southern constellation of Circinus.

This mosaic from WISE covers an area on the sky so large that it could contain a grid of 11 by 7 full moons.

The cloud itself is some 2,280 light-years away and spans more than 180 light-years across.

When an interstellar cloud becomes dense and cool enough, molecules can form in it, so astronomers call these molecular clouds.

Molecular clouds are where stars first form, and astronomers study them hoping to learn about the earliest stages in the lives of stars.

These clouds are so dense that the dust within blocks visible wavelengths of light. Telescopes that see visible light only detect ghostly dark patches in the sky, called dark nebulae.

Constellation of Circinus. Visible in the southern hemisphere and best at mid-evening during June. A small constellation, first defined in the 18th century.

The infrared vision of WISE was able to pierce through the cloud and see the light of the dust itself and newly forming stars within.

The colours used in this image represent specific wavelengths of infrared light.

Blue and cyan represent light emitted at wavelengths of 3.4 and 4.6 microns, which is predominantly from stars.

Green and red represent light from 12 and 22 microns, respectively, which is mostly emitted by dust.

In the western part of the cloud (right of the image center) there is a prominent cluster of red-colored sources.

This is light coming from large amounts of warm, concentrated dust. These are what astronomers call young stellar objects, stars so new that they have yet to begin nuclear fusion in their cores and are enveloped by cocoons of dust.

These young stars also power large-scale outflows of gas that are detected by radio telescopes. As these young stars develop, they will emerge from their cocoons and begin to light up their surroundings, making the Circinus cloud shine in visible light.

Also in this image: the brightest star in the upper-right is IRAS 14484-6152, a giant star rich in carbon. The red object to the east (left) of the brightest nebulosity is an O-type star.

It derives its red colour from the surrounding dust, which is being heated by this massive star.

IRAS 14568-6304 is one of several outflow sources in the Circinus-West clump. Together, these sources make up one of the brightest, most massive, and most energetic outflows ever reported.

Scientists have even suggested calling Circinus-West the “nest of molecular outflows” in tribute to this activity.

Hubble IRAS 14568-6304: Violent Birth Announcement from an Infant Star

Image courtesy ESA/Hubble and NASA. Acknowledgements: R. Sahai, NASA JPL/ Serge Meunier. 

This Hubble image shows IRAS 14568-6304, a young star that is cloaked in a haze of golden gas and dust.

It appears to be embedded within an intriguing swoosh of dark sky, which curves through the image and obscures the sky behind.

The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), has uncovered a striking population of young stellar objects in a complex of dense, dark clouds in the southern constellation of Circinus.

This dark region is known as the Circinus molecular cloud.

This cloud has a mass around 250 000 times that of the sun, and it is filled with gas, dust and young stars.

Within this cloud lie two prominent and enormous regions known colloquially to astronomers as Circinus-West and Circinus-East.

Each of these clumps has a mass of around 5000 times that of the sun, making them the most prominent star-forming sites in the Circinus cloud.

The clumps are associated with a number of young stellar objects, and IRAS 14568-6304, featured here under a blurry fog of gas within Circinus-West, is one of them.

IRAS 14568-6304 is special because it is driving a protostellar jet, which appears here as the "tail" below the star. This jet is the leftover gas and dust that the star took from its parent cloud to help form it.

While most of this material forms the star and its accretion disc, the disc of material surrounding the star, which may one day form planets, at some point in the formation process the star began to eject some of the material at supersonic speeds through space.

This phenomenon is not only beautiful, but can also provide us with valuable clues about the process of star formation.

NASA WISE Image: Helix Nebula

A dying star, called the Helix nebula, is shown surrounded by the tracks of asteroids in an image captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). 

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

In an unexpected juxtaposition of cosmic objects that are actually quite far from each other, a newly released image from NASA's Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) shows a dying star, called the Helix nebula, surrounded by the tracks of asteroids.

The nebula is far outside our solar system, while the asteroid tracks are inside our solar system.

The portrait, discovered by chance in a search for asteroids, comes at a time when the mission's team is celebrating its fourth launch anniversary -- and new lease on life.

In August, NASA decided to bring WISE out of hibernation to search for more asteroids. The mission was rechristened NEOWISE, formerly the name of the asteroid-hunting portion of WISE.

"I was recently looking for asteroids in images collected in 2010, and this picture jumped out at me," said Amy Mainzer, the NEOWISE principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "I recognized the Helix nebula right away."

WISE launched into the morning skies above Vandenberg Air Force Base in central California on Dec. 14, 2009.

By early 2011, it had finished scanning the entire sky twice in infrared light, snapping pictures of nearly one billion objects, including remote galaxies, stars and asteroids.

Upon completing its main goals, WISE was put to sleep. Now, engineers are bringing the spacecraft out of slumber, as it cools back down to the chilly temperatures required for infrared observations.

The spacecraft no longer has onboard coolant, but two of its infrared channels still work and can be used for asteroid hunting.

"WISE is the spacecraft that keeps on giving," said Ned Wright of UCLA, the principal investigator of WISE before it transitioned into NEOWISE.

In the Helix nebula image, infrared wavelengths of light have been assigned different colors, with longer wavelengths being red, and shorter, blue.

The bluish-green and red materials are expelled remnants of what was once a star similar to our sun. As the star aged, it puffed up and its outer layers sloughed off.

The burnt-out core of the star, called a white dwarf, is heating the expelled material, inducing it to glow with infrared light.

Over time, the brilliant object, known as a planetary nebula, will fade away, leaving just the white dwarf.

NASA's WISE discover rare galaxy furiously burning fuel for stars

The tiny red spot in this image is one of the most efficient star-making galaxies ever observed, converting gas into stars at the maximum possible rate. 

The galaxy is shown here in an image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), which first spotted the rare galaxy in infrared light. 

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/IRAM

Astronomers have found a galaxy turning gas into stars with almost 100 percent efficiency, a rare phase of galaxy evolution that is the most extreme yet observed.

The findings come from the IRAM Plateau de Bure interferometer in the French Alps, NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer and NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

Jim Geach

"Galaxies burn gas like a car engine burns fuel. Most galaxies have fairly inefficient engines, meaning they form stars from their stellar fuel tanks far below the maximum theoretical rate," said Jim Geach of McGill University, lead author of a new study appearing in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

"This galaxy is like a highly tuned sports car, converting gas to stars at the most efficient rate thought to be possible," he said.

The galaxy, called SDSSJ1506+54, jumped out at the researchers when they looked at it using data from WISE's all-sky infrared survey. Infrared light is pouring out of the galaxy, equivalent to more than a thousand billion times the energy of our sun.

Ned Wright

"Because WISE scanned the entire sky, it detected rare galaxies like this one that stand out from the rest," said Ned Wright of UCLA, the WISE principal investigator.

Hubble's visible-light observations revealed that the galaxy is extremely compact, with most of its light emanating from a region just a few hundred light-years across.

"This galaxy is forming stars at a rate hundreds of times faster than our Milky Way galaxy, but the sharp vision of Hubble revealed that the majority of the galaxy's starlight is being emitted by a region just a few percent of the diameter of the Milky Way. This is star formation at its most extreme," said Geach.

The team then used the IRAM Plateau de Bure Interferometer to measure the amount of gas in the galaxy. The ground-based telescope detected millimeter-wave light coming from carbon monoxide, an indicator of the presence of hydrogen gas, which is fuel for stars.

Combining the rate of star formation derived with WISE, and the gas mass measured by IRAM, the scientists get a measure of the star formation efficiency.

The results reveal that the star-forming efficiency of the galaxy is close to the theoretical maximum, called the Eddington limit. In regions of galaxies where new stars are forming, parts of gas clouds are collapsing due to gravity. When the gas is dense enough to squeeze atoms together and ignite nuclear fusion, a star is born.

At the same time, winds and radiation from stars that have just formed can prevent the formation of new stars by exerting pressure on the surrounding gas, curtailing the collapse.

The Eddington limit is the point at which the force of gravity pulling gas together is balanced by the outward pressure from the stars. Above the Eddington limit, the gas clouds would be blown apart, halting star formation.

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 WISE Presents a Cosmic Wreath

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission presents the "Wreath nebula." Though its official name is actually Barnard 3, or IRAS Ring G159.6-18.5, one might picture a wreath in these bright green and red dust clouds. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Just in time for the holidays, astronomers have come across a new image from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, that some say resembles a wreath. You might even think of the red dust cloud as a cheery red bow, and the bluish-white stars as silver bells.

This star-forming nebula is named Barnard 3. Baby stars are being born throughout the dusty region, while the "silver bell" stars are located both in front of, and behind, the nebula.

The bright star in the middle of the red cloud, called HD 278942, is so luminous that it is likely causing most of the surrounding clouds to glow. The red cloud is probably made of dust that is more metallic and cooler than the surrounding regions.

The yellow-green region poking into the picture from the left like a sprig of holly is similar to the rest of the green "wreath" material, only more dense.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages and operates the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. The principal investigator, Edward Wright, is at UCLA.

NASA Hubble Image: A 'Vie en Rose' Made of Galaxies

In celebration of the twenty-first anniversary of the Hubble Space Telescope's deployment in April 2011, astronomers at the Space Telescope Science Institute pointed Hubble's eye to an especially photogenic group of interacting galaxies called Arp 273.

The larger of the spiral galaxies, known as UGC 1810, has a disk that is tidally distorted into a rose-like shape by the gravitational tidal pull of the companion galaxy below it, known as UGC 1813. 

A swath of blue jewels across the top is the combined light from clusters of intensely bright and hot young blue stars. These massive stars glow fiercely in ultraviolet light.

The smaller, nearly edge-on companion shows distinct signs of intense star formation at its nucleus, perhaps triggered by the encounter with the companion galaxy.

A series of uncommon spiral patterns in the large galaxy is a tell-tale sign of interaction. The large, outer arm appears partially as a ring, a feature seen when interacting galaxies actually pass through one another. 

This suggests that the smaller companion actually dived deep, but off-centre, through UGC 1810. 

The inner set of spiral arms is highly warped out of the plane with one of the arms going behind the bulge and coming back out the other side. How these two spiral patterns connect is still not precisely known.

The interaction was imaged on Dec. 17, 2010, with Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3).

This Hubble image is a composite of data taken with three separate filters on WFC3 that allow a broad range of wavelengths covering the ultraviolet, blue and red portions of the spectrum.

Image Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA)

Enigmatic Cluster Targeted by Hubble | ESA/Hubble

The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope has used its powerful optics to separate the globular cluster NGC 6401 into its constituent stars. What was once only visible as a ghostly mist in the eyepieces of astronomical instruments has been transformed into a stunning stellar landscape.

NGC 6401 can be found within the constellation of Ophiuchus (The Serpent Bearer). The globular cluster itself is relatively faint, so a telescope and some observational experience are required to see it.

Globular clusters are very rich, and generally spherical, collections of stars, hence the name. They orbit the cores of galaxies, with the force of gravity also keeping the stars bound as a group.

There are around 160 globular clusters associated with our Milky Way, of which NGC 6401 is one. These objects are very old, containing some of the most ancient stars known. However, there are many mysteries surrounding them, with the origin of globular clusters and their role within galaxy evolution not being completely understood.

The famous astronomer William Herschel discovered this cluster in 1784 with his 47 cm telescope, but mistakenly believed it to be a bright nebula. Later his son, John Herschel, was to make the same error — evidently the technology of the day was insufficient to allow the individual stars to be resolved visually.

NGC 6401 has confused more modern astronomers as well. In 1977 it was thought that a low-mass star in the cluster had been discovered venting its outer layers (known as a planetary nebula).

However, a further study in 1990 concluded that the object is in fact a symbiotic star: a binary composed of a red giant and a small hot star such as a white dwarf, with surrounding nebulosity.

It could be that the study in 1977 was simply a few thousand years ahead of its time, as symbiotic stars are thought to become a type of planetary nebula.

This picture was created from images taken with the Wide Field Channel of Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys. Images through a yellow-orange filter (F606W, coloured blue) were combined with images taken in the near-infrared (F814W, coloured red). The total exposure times were 680 s and 580 s, respectively and the field of view is 3.3 x 1.5 arcminutes.

Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA

Omega Centauri

Over 10 million stars shine in the central part of the globular cluster Omega Centauri (NGC 5139), which was captured by the Wide Field Imager camera at ESO's La Silla Observatory.

(Image: ESO)

Helix nebula

This image of the Helix nebula (NGC 7293) is a colour composite of data from the Wide Field Imager, a 67-megapixel camera attached to the 2.2-metre Max Planck Society/ESO telescope at La Silla Observatory in Chile.

Oxygen atoms shine blue-green at the centre because of intense ultraviolet radiation from the 120,000 °C central star. Further out, hydrogen and nitrogen glow red. Remote galaxies can be seen through the centre of the nebula.

(Image: ESO)

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer ( WISE): California Nebula

NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, features one of the bright stars in the constellation Perseus, named Menkhib (at upper left near the red dust cloud), surrounded by the large star-forming California Nebula, running diagonally through the image.

Menkhib is one of the hottest stars visible in the night sky; its surface temperature is about 37,000 Kelvin (about 66,000 degrees Fahrenheit, or more than six times hotter than the sun),and because of its high temperature, it appears blue-white to the human eye.

It has about 40 times the mass of our sun and gives off 330,000 times the amount of light. Menkhib is a runaway star, and the fast stellar wind it blows is piling up in front of it to create a shock wave. This shock wave is heating up dust, which WISE sees as the red cloud in the upper left of the image.

Menkhib and the California Nebula are about 1,800 light-years away from Earth and are located within the same spur of the Orion spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy as Earth.

All four infrared detectors aboard WISE were used to make this image.

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

Launch of WISE Satellite is imminent: Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer

WISE is shown inside one-half of the nose cone, or fairing, that will protect it during launch. The spacecraft is clamped to the top of the rocket above the white conical fitting.


The fairing will split open like a clamshell about five minutes after launch. Credit: United Launch Alliance/ JPL-Caltech/JPL-Caltech

The launch of NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, aboard a Delta II rocket is scheduled to occur between 9:09 a.m. and 9:23 a.m. EST on Wednesday, Dec. 9, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. NASA will provide television and Internet coverage of prelaunch activities and launch.

After launch, WISE will scan the entire sky in infrared light with a sensitivity hundreds of times greater than ever before, picking up the glow of hundreds of millions of objects and producing millions of images.

The mission will 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.