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Spitzer Space Telescope

Infrared light is the key to studying a wide range of astronomical systems, including newborn stars and planets, dust in distant galaxies, and material swirling around black holes. The Spitzer Space Telescope was NASA’s orbiting infrared observatory, and part of NASA’s Great Observatories program, along with the Chandra X-ray Observatory and the Hubble Space Telescope. Scientists and engineers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian led the design, testing, and construction of the Infrared Array Camera (IRAC). The Spitzer Space Telescope was launched in 2003 and retired in 2020.

Visit the Spitzer Space Telescope IRAC Page

artistic rendition of the Spitzer Space Telescope

Artistic rendition of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope in position to establish communications with Earth. Spitzer is 210 million kilometers (130 million miles) away from Earth, or about 1.5 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (IPAC)

The Telescope and the Science

The Spitzer Space Telescope was named in honor of astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer, who promoted the idea of orbiting observatories in the 1940s. Launched into space in 2003, the observatory was the final NASA Great Observatory to be put in service, following the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and the now-inoperative Compton Gamma Ray Observatory. Unlike the other Great Observatories, Spitzer orbited the Sun directly at a distance far enough from Earth to keep our planet’s infrared light from interfering with observations.

As an infrared observatory, Spitzer collected light from regions of space that are hidden from optical telescopes, and it could detect light emitted from cooler objects. For example, Spitzer was able to peer through interstellar dust clouds that are both home and raw materials for star and planet formation. Scientists also used Spitzer to identify molecules and temperature variations in the atmospheres of giant exoplanets, spot brown dwarfs in orbit around other stars, and to identify supermassive black holes in distant galaxies by the matter swirling around them.

CfA astrophysicist Giovanni Fazio led the team that proposed, designed, built, and tested Spitzer’s main infrared camera IRAC, which took images at wavelengths between 3.6 and 8 millionths of a meter. Other contributors to IRAC included NASA’s Ames Research Center and Goddard Space Flight Center, the University of Arizona, and the University of Rochester. The IRAC science team is located at the CfA and worked with the operations center at Caltech.

Spitzer’s original observation program was intended to last two and a half years, but the telescope performed well enough to continue operating well past that deadline. Of Spitzer’s original three instruments, only IRAC operated after the exhaustion of its cryogenic helium supply until the telescope was retired in January 2020. The other two instruments were: the Infrared Spectrograph (IRS), for measuring the spectrum of infrared light at a wider range of wavelengths; and the Multiband Imaging Photometer for Spitzer (MIPS), which operated at the long-wavelength end of the infrared spectrum.

 

Spitzer Space Telescope image of one of Milky Way's "bones"

Astronomers used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to identify the first "bone" of the Milky Way, the dark tendril of dust and gas in this image. The "bone" is a type of filament that makes up structures seen in other spiral galaxies.

Credit: NASA/JPL/SSC
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Atomic and Molecular Physics, High Energy Astrophysics, Optical and Infrared Astronomy, Radio and Geoastronomy, Solar, Stellar, and Planetary Sciences, Theoretical Astrophysics, Harvard University Department of Astronomy, Science Education Department, Central Engineering, Director's Office, Chandra X-ray Center, Institute for Theoretical Atomic Molecular and Optical Physics, Institute for Theory and Computation
AstroAI is a institute dedicated to the development of artificial intelligence to enable next generation astrophysics at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian. Learn More
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From Molecular Cores to Planet Forming Disks (c2d)

Since the 1990s, astronomers have identified thousands of exoplanets, indicating that the Milky Way alone could be host to hundreds of billions of planets. However, we are still learning how these planets formed in the first place, crucial information in understanding the variety of systems researchers have cataloged. To fill in those gaps, astronomers from the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian collaborated with others from around the world on the project named “From Molecular Cores to Planet Forming Disks” (c2d). This program used NASA’s Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope to observe star-forming systems and the protoplanetary disks where future planets are born. The c2d program ended its observational phase in the mid-2000s, but maintains a catalog of these systems that continues to be used by astronomers studying star formation.
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Gould's Belt Survey

Radio and Geoastronomy
Gould’s Belt is a long chain of clouds in the Milky Way comprised of stellar nurseries and hot young stars. Stretching across a substantial part of the night sky, Gould’s Belt includes the Orion Nebula — the middle object in Orion’s “sword” — and a number of other star-forming regions. These regions are opaque in visible light, so the Spitzer Gould’s Belt Survey project used NASA’s Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope, the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Observatory, and the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope in Hawaii to map the region in infrared and submillimeter light. The survey was led by scientists at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, in collaboration with a number of other institutions around the world. Since the completion of observations in 2006, the data has continued to supply astronomers with insights into the formation of new stars in the Milky Way.
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The Cygnus-X Spitzer Legacy Survey

The Cygnus-X region of the Milky Way is a veritable factory for making new stars, including a large number of giant hot stars. The Cygnus-X Spitzer Legacy Survey is dedicated to studying how these giant stars formed, and how they affect the growth of smaller stars in their vicinity. Led by researchers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, this survey used NASA’s Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope to identify and track the course of star formation in Cygnus-X in multiple wavelengths of infrared light. Though the observational portion of the survey is over, researchers at CfA and many other institutions continue to generate new astronomical insights from its data.
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The Star Formation Reference Survey

Optical and Infrared Astronomy
Astronomers study star formation as a way of understanding our own origins, as well as the structure of galaxies and the evolution of the cosmos as a whole. However, the farther back in time, astronomers often rely on a single measurement type for each galaxy to measure star-formation rates. The Star Formation Reference Survey (SFRS) is designed to improve and assess the reliability of all of these measurements by cataloging nearby star formation, using NASA’s Spitzer Infrared Space Telescope and other observatories. The data produced provides a useful reference data across a wide range of wavelengths in the spectrum of light, which can be applied across surveys of star formation in close-by and distant galaxies. The SFRS observational effort is led by astronomers at the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian, in collaboration with other researchers around the world.
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