Saturday, October 28, 2006

Cassiopeia

This image from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and provided on Thursday Oct. 26, 2006 shows the scattered remains of an exploded star named Cassiopeia A. Spitzer's infrared detectors 'picked' through these remains and found that much of the star's original layering had been preserved. In this false-color image, the faint, blue glow surrounding the dead star is material that was energized by a shock wave, called the forward shock, which was created when the star blew up. The forward shock is now located at the outer edge of the blue glow. Stars are also seen in blue. Green, yellow and red primarily represent material that was ejected in the explosion and heated by a slower shock wave, called the reverse shock wave. (AP Photo/NASA)

Friday, October 20, 2006

Andromeda

The Andromeda spiral galaxy is shown in this infrared image taken by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope and released by on October 18, 2006. Astronomers have new evidence that the Andromeda spiral galaxy was involved in a violent head-on collision with the neighboring dwarf galaxy Messier 32 (M32) more than 200 million years ago. (NASA/JPL-Caltech/D. Block - Anglo American Cosmic Dust Lab, SA/Handout/Reuters)