Results from infrared astronomy:

The mass of the center of our Galaxy:

The orbit of a star around the Galactic Center, showing the presence of a central black hole of several million solar masses:

Images of the Bok globule Barnard 68. Top, a color composite of visible-light images of different colors. Bottom, a composite of visible and near-infrared images, showing the stars hidden behind the cloud.

The visual extinction through the cloud as a function of radius. This probes the density of the gas in the cloud, which matches theoretical models of a cloud that is supported only by gas pressure, not by magnetic fields or turbulence:

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A disk around a somewhat older star, HR 4796. This image was made at the Keck telescope, at wavelengths of 12 and 20 microns.

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The separate 12 (left) and 20 (right) micron images of HR 4796. Notice that the (cold) disk only shows up at the longer wavelength. Interestingly, the disk does not appear brighter in the middle even though it should be hotter there. This suggests that there may be a hole in the middle of the disk, perhaps cleared by planets. The hole would not be resolved in this image.

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The HR 4796 disk seen with the Hubble Space Telescope:

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An artist's conception of the ring:

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Even without resolving a disk, measuring the brightness at different infrared wavelengths can reveal its structure:

 

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IRAS found "ultraluminous infrared galaxies", which emit up to 10 times more energy in the IR than in the optical:

An HST picture in the near-IR shows the colliding nuclei in the galaxy...

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... and an ISO spectrum shows that much of the emission is from molecular hydrogen:

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Spectra of the three most distant quasars that are currently known. Note that there is no light in these spectra in the visible band (shortward of 7000 Angstroms)!

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Higher-quality spectrum of the most distant known quasar (as of June 2006), with a redshift of z=6.43.

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