The star-forming cloud known as NGC 3603 is teeming with gas, dust and massive newborn stars in this Feb. 17 image from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The sky-mapping telescope, which surveys the whole sky in infrared light, is particularly sensitive to the warm dust that permeates star-forming clouds like this one. The cluster contains some of the most massive stars known.

NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, highights the Andromeda Galaxy in one of the first images sent down from orbit. The top image shows our next-door galaxy’s older stellar population in shades of blue. The image was taken using the shortest-wavelength camera on WISE. You can clearly see a pronounced warp in the spiral arm on the upper left side of the galaxy’s disk. Scientists believe the warp is the result of a collision with another galaxy. The bottom image is a mosaic created by combining data from all four of WISE’s infrared detectors. Once again, shades of blue highlight mature stars. The yellow and red areas indicate where dust has been heated by newborn, massive stars. The images were released Feb. 17.

This image of a dense cluster of galaxies was captured by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The cluster, called Fornax because of its location in a constellation of the same name, is 60 million light-years from Earth, making it one of the closest galaxy clusters to the Milky Way. Clusters are large families of galaxies that are gravitationally bound together, containing enough matter to pull even distant galaxies toward them. The center of the cluster is dominated by the galaxy known as NGC 1399, a large spheroidal galaxy whose light is almost exclusively from old stars and thus appears blue. The most spectacular member of Fornax is the galaxy known as NGC 1365, a giant barred spiral galaxy, located in the lower right of the mosaic.

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