Press Releases

Press releases making use of data hosted at IRSA are presented below.

May 16, 2012NEOWISE Counts Potentially Hazardous Asteroids

This diagram shows an edge-on view of our solar system. The dots represent a snapshot of the population of NEAs and PHAs that scientists think are likely to exist based on the NEOWISE survey. Positions of a simulated population of PHAs on a typical day are shown in bright orange, and the simulated NEAs are blue. Earth's orbit is green.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

March 14, 2012WISE All-Sky Data Release

This is a mosaic of the images covering the entire sky as observed by WISE, part of the All-Sky Data Release.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

January 10, 2012Spitzer Shows Space Nursery

A bubbling cauldron of star birth is highlighted in this new image from the Spitzer Space Telescope. Infrared light that we can't see with our eyes has been color-coded, such that the shortest wavelengths are shown in blue and the longest in red. The middle wavelength range is green.
Massive stars have blown bubbles, or cavities, in the dust and gas -- a violent process that triggers both the death and birth of stars. The brightest, yellow-white regions are warm centers of star formation. The green shows tendrils of dust, and red indicates other types of dust that may be cooler, in addition to ionized gas from nearby massive stars. Cygnus X is about 4,500 light-years away in the constellation Cygnus, or the Swan.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/Harvard-Smithsonian CfA

August 23, 2011WISE Discovers Coolest Class of Stars

WISE has discovered the coldest known brown dwarf, WISE 1828+2650, shown in green on this image. WISE 1828+2650 is a Y dwarf with a temperature less than 80 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius).
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

July 27, 2011WISE Finds Earth's First Trojan Asteroid

Asteroid 2010 TK7 is circled in green, in this single frame taken by WISE. The majority of the other dots are stars or galaxies far beyond our solar system. Astronomers discovered this object -- the first known Earth Trojan asteroid -- after sifting through asteroid candidates identified by WISE. This image was taken in infrared light at a wavelength of 4.6 microns in Oct. 2010.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA

June 30, 2011Spitzer Finds Distant Galaxies Grazed on Gas

Spitzer observations of the GOODS field revealed that distant populations of galaxies formed massive, bright stars more commonly than today's galaxies. Such early galaxies would have been brighter, bluer and more irregular than spiral galaxies today due to the large proportion of massive stars. The Spitzer observations also demonstrate that these distant galaxies fed off steady streams of gas, rather than bursts of gas stirred up from collisions with other galaxies.
Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/STScI/R. Hurt (SSC)
Selected recent journal articles making use of IRSA data or services can be found on the Publications page.