The matter that can be seen spread across the sky as planets, comets, stars, nebulae, galaxies and the rest makes up just under 15% of the total.
Such planetary nebulae form when red-giant stars blow ionised gas outward as they transition to white dwarfs.
At a cost of $1.3 billion it should provide a hundredfold increase in sensitivity and resolution over the best older instruments.Those older telescopes had to focus on nebulae, where the interstellar gas is most concentrated (a familiar one, visible through binoculars, is the gas cloud around the stars that make up Orion's sword).
The data thus collected should allow the process of planet formation to be followed from beginning to end.Dating early galaxies and the study of circumstellar nebulae are triumphs for Spitzer alone.
The Doppler effect (think passing police sirens) changes the frequency of light received from these receding objects in a redward direction.Spitzer's other mission, examining the circumstellar nebulae that are the birthplaces of planets, also plays to its strengths.
Networks of these computing plants form "computing clouds"—vast, amorphous, delocalised nebulae of processing power and storage.Service with a simileMarc Benioff, a cloud-computing pioneer and the boss of Salesforce.com, which helps firms manage their customers on the web thinks this will spell the "death of software".
Such are the facts that can be gleaned from an utterly delightful data visualisation created by Michael and Cary Huang, which allows you to fly through space comparing the size of everything from neutrinos to nebulae.
Moreover, these molecules tend to be concentrated in the sorts of nebulae in which stars and their associated planetary systems are known to form.Sadly, though, few of the 135 chemicals found so far resemble any important building block of life.
Such nebulae are sites of tremendous star formation, with new stars' radiation lighting up the dust clouds from which they are born.
Spitzer has already looked at hundreds of such nebulae, of different ages.
In India, political parties often seem like shapeless nebulae illuminated by star candidates.
