Five billion years from now, our Milky Way galaxy will collide with the Andromeda galaxy. This will mark a moment of both destruction and creation. The galaxies will lose their separate identities as they merge into one. At the same time, cosmic clouds of gas and dust will smash together, triggering the birth of new stars.

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The image shows one of the most active and turbulent regions of star birth in our galaxy, a region called Cygnus X.

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For the last 1,000 days the Infrared Array Camera, aboard NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, has been operating continuously to probe the universe from its most distant regions to our local solar neighborhood.

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The Spitzer Space Telescope is so sensitive it can see objects optical telescopes cannot. Here are some incredible images it has helped capture.

In Eliot Spitzer's sex scandal and tragicomic downfall, the question that bugged many people did not have to do with ethics or politics, but whether Spitzer got a raw deal.

Wien : SafÏar, 1905.

The high-resolution image of the star-forming region - named for its spidery filaments of gas - is made up of data from several observations by the telescope.

After more than 16 years studying the universe in infrared light since its launch in 2003, NASA has switched off the Spitzer Space Telescope, bringing its mission to an end.