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Summary

Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have spotted a "dust factory" thirty million light-years away in the spiral galaxy M74. The factory is located at the scene of a massive star's explosive death, or supernova.

While astronomers have suspected for years that supernovae could be producers of cosmic dust particles, the technology to confirm this suspicion has only recently become available.

The dust factory, also known as supernova SN 2003gd, is shown at the center of the two small insets from Spitzer's Infrared Array Camera (IRAC). A white arrow points to its exact location. The yellow-green dot shown in the July 2004 inset (top) shows that the source's temperature is warmer than the surrounding material. This is because newly formed dust within the supernova is just starting to cool. By January 2005, the dust had cooled and completely faded from IRAC's view. However, it was still detected in January 2005 by another instrument aboard Spitzer called the Multiband Imaging Photometer (MIPS). The MIPS image is not shown here.

The larger image to the right of the insets is the galaxy M74, as seen by Spitzer's Infrared Array Camera. The white box to the left of the galaxy's center identifies the location of the supernova remnant. In all the images, the blue dots represent hot gas and stars. The galaxy's cool dust is shown in red.

The images are false-color, infrared composites, in which 3.6-micron light is blue, 4.5-micron light is green, and 8-micron light is red.

File info

Description Supernova Dust Factory in M74
Date
Source http://gallery.spitzer.caltech.edu/Imagegallery/image.php?image_name=sig06-018
Author NASA/JPL-Caltech/B.E.K. Sugerman (STScI)
Permission
(Reusing this file)
http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/mediaimages/copyright.shtml

Individual images

see http://gallery.spitzer.caltech.edu/Imagegallery/image.php?image_name=sig06-018 High quality tif files also avaliable.

Licensing

Public domain This file is in the public domain in the United States because it was solely created by NASA. NASA copyright policy states that "NASA material is not protected by copyright unless noted". (See Template:PD-USGov, NASA copyright policy page or JPL Image Use Policy.)
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8 June 2006

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current19:23, 11 July 2007Thumbnail for version as of 19:23, 11 July 20073,000 × 2,400 (2.61 MB)Anzibanonzi==Summary== Astronomers using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope have spotted a "dust factory" thirty million light-years away in the spiral galaxy M74. The factory is located at the scene of a massive star's explosive death, or supernova. While astronomers

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