page_title: Spitzer Space Telescope
section_title: Results
hierarchical_section_title: Spitzer Space Telescope / Results
context_page_description: The Spitzer Space Telescope, formerly the Space Infrared Telescope Facility, was an infrared space telescope launched in 2003 and retired on 30 January 2020.
  The planned mission period was to be 2.5 years with a pre-launch expectation that the mission could extend to five or slightly more years until the onboard liquid helium supply was exhausted. This occurred on 15 May 2009. Without liquid helium to cool the telescope to the very low temperatures needed to operate, most of the instruments were no longer usable. However, the two shortest-wavelength modules of the IRAC camera continued to operate with the same sensitivity as before the cryogen was exhausted, and continued to be used into early 2020 in the Spitzer Warm Mission. Pre-launch tests had been conducted to determine the expected performance of the equipment in this state, along with tests at the University of Rochester, confirming the continuing capability of the detectors. During the warm mission, the two short wavelength channels of IRAC operated at 30 K, which was predicted to experience little to no degradation compared to the nominal mission.
context_section_description: While some time on the telescope was reserved for participating institutions and crucial projects, astronomers around the world also had the opportunity to submit proposals for observing time. Prior to launch, there was a proposal call for large, coherent investigations using Spitzer. If the telescope failed early and/or ran out of cryogen very quickly, these so-called Legacy Projects would ensure the best possible science could be obtained quickly in the early months of the mission. As a requirement tied to the funding these Legacy teams received, the teams had to deliver high-level data products back to the Spitzer Science Center (and the [NASA/IPAC Infrared Science Archive | Infrared_Science_Archive]) for use by the community, again ensuring the rapid scientific return of the mission. The international scientific community quickly realized the value of delivering products for others to use, and even though Legacy projects were no longer explicitly solicited in subsequent proposal calls, teams continued to deliver products to the community. The Spitzer Science Center later reinstated named "Legacy" projects (and later still "Exploration Science" projects) in response to this community-driven effort.
  Important targets included forming stars (young stellar objects, or YSOs), planets, and other galaxies. Images are freely available for educational and journalistic purposes. 
  The first released images from Spitzer were designed to show off the abilities of the telescope and showed a glowing stellar nursery, a big swirling, dusty galaxy, a disc of planet-forming debris, and organic material in the distant universe. Since then, many monthly press releases have highlighted Spitzer's capabilities, as the NASA and ESA images do for the Hubble Space Telescope.
  As one of its most noteworthy observations, in 2005, Spitzer became the first telescope to directly capture light from exoplanets, namely the "hot Jupiters" HD 209458 b and TrES-1b, although it did not resolve that light into actual images. This was the first time the light from extrasolar planets had been directly detected; earlier observations had been indirectly made by drawing conclusions from behaviors of the stars the planets were orbiting. The telescope also discovered in April 2005 that Cohen-kuhi Tau/4 had a planetary disk that was vastly younger and contained less mass than previously theorized, leading to new understandings of how planets are formed.
  In 2004, it was reported that Spitzer had spotted a faintly glowing body that may be the youngest star ever seen. The telescope was trained on a core of gas and dust known as L1014 which had previously appeared completely dark to ground-based observatories and to ISO (Infrared Space Observatory), a predecessor to Spitzer. The advanced technology of Spitzer revealed a bright red hot spot in the middle of L1014.
  Scientists from the University of Texas at Austin, who discovered the object, believe the hot spot to be an example of early star development, with the young star collecting gas and dust from the cloud around it. Early speculation about the hot spot was that it might have been the faint light of another core that lies 10 times further from Earth but along the same line of sight as L1014. Follow-up observation from ground-based near-infrared observatories detected a faint fan-shaped glow in the same location as the object found by Spitzer. That glow is too feeble to have come from the more distant core, leading to the conclusion that the object is located within L1014. (Young et al., 2004)
  In 2005, astronomers from the University of Wisconsin at Madison and Whitewater determined, on the basis of 400 hours of observation on the Spitzer Space Telescope, that the Milky Way galaxy has a more substantial bar structure across its core than previously recognized.
  Also in 2005, astronomers Alexander Kashlinsky and John Mather of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center reported that one of Spitzer's earliest images may have captured the light of the first stars in the universe. An image of a quasar in the Draco constellation
caption: The Andromeda Galaxy taken by MIPS at 24 micrometers.
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