By Ron Cowen
Astronomers this week unveiled some really cool images–along with some positively chilling spectra. The new images include pictures of a hidden stellar nursery and the first spectra ever taken of organic material in a remote galaxy. An infrared observatory, the Spitzer Space Telescope, had gathered the data since its launch last August.
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The telescope “will change the way astronomers do astronomy,” predicts John N. Bahcall of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J. With Spitzer’s infrared capability, “it will no longer be astronomically correct to characterize a system by only X-ray, optical, or ultraviolet light,” he adds.