SUMMARY: NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has provided a detailed view of a hatchery for new stars in the Trifid Nebula. Obscured in visible light, the heat from these stellar incubators can be detected by Spitzer's infrared instruments. The Trifid Nebula is a giant star-forming cloud of gas and dust located 5,400 light-years away in the constellation of Sagittarius. Previous images had hinted that the nebula contained four cold "knots" of dust. Astronomers knew these these are the incubators, where new stars are born, but they didn't think they had actually begun star formation yet. Spitzer revealed that they had already formed at least 30 embryonic stars.

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