A Cauldron of Stars at the Milky Way's Center | NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (Infrared)

A Cauldron of Stars at the Milky Way's Center | NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope (Infrared)

Before the James Webb Space Telescope, NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope was the largest infrared telescope. This dazzling infrared image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope shows hundreds of thousands of stars crowded into the swirling core of our spiral Milky Way galaxy.

The Spitzer Space Telescope (formerly SIRTF, the Space Infrared Telescope Facility) was launched by a Delta rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida on August 25, 2003. Consisting of a 0.85-meter telescope and three cryogenically-cooled science instruments, Spitzer was the largest infrared space telescope before the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was launched in December 2021. The telescope was named in honor of American astronomer, Lyman Spitzer, who had promoted the concept of space telescopes in the 1940s. The retired Spitzer was the first observatory to provide high-resolution images of the near- and mid-infrared Universe. Webb, by virtue of its significantly larger primary mirror and improved detectors, will allow us to see the infrared sky with improved clarity (better spatial resolution), enabling even more discoveries.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, managed the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA's Science Mission Directorate (SMD). Science operations were conducted at the Spitzer Science Center, at Caltech, in Pasadena, California. Spacecraft operations were based at Lockheed Martin Space Systems Company, Littleton, Colorado. Data are archived at the Infrared Science Archive housed at Caltech/IPAC. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Image Date: January 10, 2006 

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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