The Gould Belt is a vast ring of active stellar nurseries and molecuar clouds encircling our Solar System. I am part of the JCMT Gould Belt Survey and the Spitzer Gould Belt Survey who study the star-forming regions within it, but what is the belt – and how did it come to be?
You may have noticed that I have ‘fallen off the internet’ this week, as a friend of mine recently said in a text message. Well the reason is that I have been attending a meeting about star formation and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
A fantastic image from the Spitzer Space Telescope (which you’ll see all over the web today) of our own Milky Way galaxy. The team have release a Google Maps API type site that lets you browse the galaxy in the infrared with some guidance.
I recently saw a Digg article which linked to a space.com page about the 10 Strangest Things in Space. All but 2 of the items were not pictures at all but computer simulations, or artists impressions. So here to correct this injustice to phenomena everywhere I present the REAL 10 Strangest Things in Space – [...]
Wednesday’s seminar speaker was Robert Kennicutt, the principal investigator of the SINGS project (Spitzer Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey). They have been using the Spitzer Space Telescope, launched 2003, to observe the dust content of the nearest galaxies.
Spitzer detects at a wide range of wavelengths in the infrared and submillimeter regimes. This is the part of [...]
Researchers using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope used the infrared telescope to map temperature variations over the surface of a giant gas planet, HD 189733b, revealing it likely is whipped by roaring winds. Using the data they have created what they call the first weather map of an exoplanet.
You can read more in their Letter to [...]
NASA researchers using the Spitzer space telescope have laid out what they have called ‘planetary danger zones’ around stars. In these zones, extending from bright O-stars, protoplanetary disks will be swept away by the strong stellar winds given out by the star. Smaller,cooler stars will continue forming planets from accretion disks so long as they [...]
Copyright © 2010 Robert J. Simpson. Twitter @orbitingfrog
