NASA's Spitzer Sees Milky Way's Blooming Countryside

June 5, 2013

J.D. Harrington
Headquarters, Washington
202-358-5241
j.d.harrington@nasa.gov

Whitney Clavin
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
818-354-4673
whitney.clavin@jpl.nasa.gov

RELEASE: 13-168

NASA'S SPITZER SEES MILKY WAY'S BLOOMING COUNTRYSIDE

WASHINGTON -- New views from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope show
blooming stars in our Milky Way galaxy's more barren territories, far
from its crowded core.

The images are part of the Galactic Legacy Infrared Mid-Plane Survey
Extraordinaire (Glimpse 360) project, which is mapping the celestial
topography of our galaxy. The map and a full, 360-degree view of the
Milky Way plane will be available later this year. Anyone with a
computer may view the Glimpse images and help catalog features.

We live in a spiral collection of stars that is mostly flat, like a
vinyl record, but it has a slight warp. Our solar system is located
about two-thirds of the way out from the Milky Way's center, in the
Orion Spur, an offshoot of the Perseus spiral arm. Spitzer's infrared
observations are allowing researchers to map the shape of the galaxy
and its warp with the most precision yet.

While Spitzer and other telescopes have created mosaics of the
galaxy's plane looking in the direction of its center before, the
region behind us, with its sparse stars and dark skies, is less
charted.

"We sometimes call this flyover country," said Barbara Whitney, an
astronomer from the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who uses
Spitzer to study young stars. "We are finding all sorts of new star
formation in the lesser-known areas at the outer edges of the
galaxy."

Whitney and colleagues are using the data to find new sites of
youthful stars. For example, they spotted an area near Canis Major
with 30 or more young stars sprouting jets of material, an early
phase in their lives. So far, the researchers have identified 163
regions containing these jets in the Glimpse 360 data, with some of
the young stars highly clustered in packs and others standing alone.

Robert Benjamin is leading a University of Wisconsin team that uses
Spitzer to more carefully pinpoint the distances to stars in the
galaxy's hinterlands. The astronomers have noticed a distinct and
rapid drop-off of red giants, a type of older star, at the edge of
the galaxy. They are using this information to map the structure of
the warp in the galaxy's disk.

"With Spitzer, we can see out to the edge of the galaxy better than
before," said Robert Benjamin of the University of Wisconsin, who
presented the results Wednesday at the 222nd meeting of the American
Astronomical Society in Indianapolis. "We are hoping this will yield
some new surprises."

Thanks to Spitzer's infrared instruments, astronomers are capturing
improved images of those remote stellar lands. Data from NASA's
Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) are helping fill in gaps
in the areas Spitzer did not cover. WISE was designed to survey the
entire sky twice in infrared light, completing the job in early 2011,
while Spitzer continues to probe the infrared sky in more detail. The
results are helping to canvas our galaxy, filling in blanks in the
outer expanses where not much is known.

Glimpse 360 already has mapped 130 degrees of the sky around the
galactic center. Four new views from the area looking away from the
galactic center are online at:

http://go.nasa.gov/ZtA1Sn

Members of the public continue scouring images from earlier Glimpse
data releases in search of cosmic bubbles indicative of hot, massive
stars. Astronomers' knowledge of how massive stars influence the
formation of other stars is benefitting from this citizen science
activity, called The Milky Way Project. For instance, volunteers
identified a striking multiple bubble structure in a star-forming
region called W39. Follow up work by the researchers showed the
smaller bubbles were spawned by a larger bubble that had been carved
out by massive stars.

"This crowdsourcing approach really works," said Charles Kerton of
Iowa State University at Ames, who also presented results. "We are
examining more of the hierarchical bubbles identified by the
volunteers to understand the prevalence of triggered star formation
in our galaxy."

For more information about the Milky Way project and to learn how to
participate, visit:

http://www.milkywayproject.org

More information about Spitzer is at:

http://www.nasa.gov/spitzer


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