Hidden Universe: NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope

One year ago, astronomers announced the discovery that seven roughly Earth-sized worlds orbited around the nearby star TRAPPIST-1. Now a year later, additional data have refined our understanding of these planets.We now know more about the TRAPPIST-1... more

This artist's concept animation shows a brown dwarf with bands of clouds, thought to resemble those seen on Neptune and the other outer planets in the solar system.

May 3rd, 2017 marks the 5,000th day of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope mission. This video gives us a detailed look at six of these days, showing how an automated observatory like Spitzer, which is effectively an astronomy robot, spends its time. It’s... more

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which launched Aug. 25, 2003, will begin an extended mission—the “Beyond” phase—on Oct. 1, 2016.

The exoplanet HD80606 b spends most of its time far from its star, but every 111 days it swings in feverishly close. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope measured the planet's extreme temperature swings using infrared light. This allowed astronomers to sim... more

Welcome home! This is our Milky Way galaxy as you’ve never seen it before. Ten years in the making, this is the clearest infrared panorama of our galactic home ever made, courtesy of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

On August 25, 2003, NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope to reveal secrets of the infrared universe.

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have detected what they believe is an alien world just two-thirds the size of Earth - one of the smallest on record!