A Stellar Nursery. The RCW 49 nebula is a stellar nursery where about 2,200 stars are forming. RCW 49 (general view, right) is located in the southern constellation of the Centaur, about 13,700 light-years from us. Such dusty nebulae are the places where stars are forming. NASA Space Spitzer Telescope recently found that about 300 stars there were surrounded by protoplanetary disks, that is dust disks remnants of the formation process, and where planets may form in turn. With its infrared ability to peer into dusty objects, Spitzer Space Telescope will provide data about thousands of disks, as, until now, only a small sample of them had been at astronomers' reach. RCW 49 protoplanetary disks are the farthest and faintest planet- forming discs ever observed. Spitzer Space Telescope is the fourth of NASA large space observatories and is aimed to study the Universe in the infrared. It was launched on August, 25th 2003. pictures courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech/E. Churchwell (University of Wisconsin)