Against the Grain: NASA Says Half of All Stars Are in Between Galaxies

NASA had announced a press conference for yesterday afternoon to reveal amazing findings that would ‘change how we look at galaxies.’  And they did just that, sort of. Findings from the Cosmic Infrared Background Experiment (CIBER) reveal that there is a huge surplus of Infrared light present in the vast darkness that exists between Galaxies.  Infrared light is invisible to the human eye, but is emitted by most room temperature objects.  It fills the EM spectrum at wavelengths longer than visible light (See yesterday’s post for the EM spectrum).  This surplus of light is greater than what we would expect from galaxies...

Galaxy’s Ring of Star formation shines face on

I’ve seen a lot of lovely images from  the Spitzer Space Telescope.  It takes infrared images and can see the fine structure of galaxies, where stars are forming and where they are not forming.  The photos paint a picture of the history and evolution of a galaxy.  The latest image released last week shows some amazing features. The Cyan light in the image is a combination of blue and green coloured light representing infrared wavelengths of light at 3.4 and 4.5 microns.  This wavelength shows the stellar population in the galaxy.  The red light is representing dust features that glow...