Hidden Universe: NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope NASA's Spitzer Science Center / IPAC / NASA / Caltech

One year ago, astronomers announced the discovery that seven roughly Earth-sized worlds orbited around the nearby star TRAPPIST-1. Now a year later, additional data have refined our understanding of these planets.We now know more about the TRAPPIST-1 system than any other solar system other than our own.

This artist's concept animation shows a brown dwarf with bands of clouds, thought to resemble those seen on Neptune and the other outer planets in the solar system.

May 3rd, 2017 marks the 5,000th day of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope mission. This video gives us a detailed look at six of these days, showing how an automated observatory like Spitzer, which is effectively an astronomy robot, spends its time. It’s overall mission design allows for an unprecedented degree of efficiency, allowing it to study the full range of astronomical phenomena including nearby objects in the solar system, stars in our galaxy, and galaxies out to the edge of the observable universe.

NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, which launched Aug. 25, 2003, will begin an extended mission—the “Beyond” phase—on Oct. 1, 2016.

Welcome home! This is our Milky Way galaxy as you’ve never seen it before. Ten years in the making, this is the clearest infrared panorama of our galactic home ever made, courtesy of NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

On August 25, 2003, NASA launched the Spitzer Space Telescope to reveal secrets of the infrared universe.