Tendrils of death reach into a star nursery

(Image: Spitzer/JPL)

Even stars must sometimes face a grim reminder of their own mortality. The green wisps floating through the picture above are the remnants of a massive star that exploded. Here its remains are intermingled with a giant pink cloud of dust and gas where new stars are being born.

Clusters of baby stars light up the cloud and blow bubbles in the gas with their powerful radiation. But these titanic toddlers live fast and die young. They will explode as supernovae, seeding the cosmos with their remains and perhaps triggering a new wave of star birth as shockwaves ripple through the gas cloud.

It is fitting that this image of life and death was made by combining infrared views from two NASA space telescopes, Spitzer and the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE).

Spitzer has been in operation for almost 10 years but ran out of coolant in 2009, so its capabilities are now limited. WISE was built to see longer infrared wavelengths, adding complexity to Spitzer's scenes. But here WISE is communicating from beyond the grave: it finished its mission and was shut down in 2011. Mission managers are now mining its archives for useful material.

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