News - Cosmic lagoons and planetary plains: the week in space

This composite image of interstellar dust in the plane of the Milky Way is among the first taken with both cameras on Europe's new Herschel infrared telescope, which launched in May.

The image, which shows a region of the sky equivalent to the area of 16 full moons, shows filaments of cold dust in various stages of star formation. Blue and green denote warmer dust imaged with Herschel's PACS camera, while red denotes cooler dust snapped with its SPIRE camera. more...