A stellar display (some never-before-seen pictures of space)

NASA showed off never-before-seen infrared images of the spectacular birth of stars and the formation of planets and galaxies on Thursday, the first pictures from its newest space telescope.

The images from the $670 million Space Infrared Telescope, which was launched in August and began sending home data in October, show objects the human eye couldn't see on its own: a glowing stellar nursery, a swirling, dusty galaxy, a disc of planet-forming debris and organic material in the distant universe.

Project scientist Michael Werner, an astrophysicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., said the telescope will "answer questions we couldn't even ask before."

John Bahcall, an astrophysicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, N.J., agreed. "For me, and I think for all astronomers, today seems very much like a dream come true," he said. "NASA really got this one right."

The telescope, whose mission is expected to keep hundreds of scientists busy for at least the next five years, also got a new name, the Spitzer Space Telescope, in honor of the late Dr. Lyman Spitzer Jr.

Spitzer, a Princeton University astronomer whose work is considered among the most significant of the 20th century, was the first to suggest that scientists place telescopes in space. That suggestion, in 1946, was an attempt to better see through the distorting and blurring effects of Earth's atmosphere.