Feast your eyes on this cosmic rose plucked by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope

In this picture snapped by NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, a cluster of newborn stars are heralding their birth. The bright young stars are found in a rosebud-shaped nebulosity known as NGC 7129 that lies 3300 light-years in the constellation Cepheus.

The young stars formed from a massive cloud of gas and dust that contains enough raw materials to create a thousand Sun-like stars. According to NASA, the rosy pink hue is produced by glowing dust grains on the surface of the bubble being heated by the intense light from the embedded young stars. The reddish colors trace the distribution of molecular material thought to be rich in hydrocarbons.

Near the image's center, three very young stars are sending jets of supersonic gas into the cloud. The impact of these jets heats molecules of carbon monoxide in the cloud, producing the intricate green nebulosity that forms the stem of the rosebud.

Away from the main nebula and its young cluster are two smaller nebulae, to the left and bottom of the central rosebud, each containing a stellar nursery with only a few young stars.

This interstellar image was obtained with an infrared array camera onboard the Spitzer telescope. The Infrared Array Camera (IRAC) is sensitive to invisible infrared light at wavelengths that are about ten times longer than visible light.

Tale as old as timeTrue as it can beIn memory of Angela Lansbury, we offer this cosmic rose plucked by our Spitzer Space Telescope. https://t.co/V1N0QynRDJ pic.twitter.com/zPduniVBsl

— NASA (@NASA) October 11, 2022

The now-retired Spitzer Space Telescope was designed to detect infrared radiation, which is primarily heat radiation. The telescope's highly sensitive instruments allowed scientists to peer into cosmic regions that are hidden from optical telescopes, including dusty stellar nurseries, the centers of galaxies, and newly forming planetary systems.

The telescope's operations ended on 30 January 2020.