NASA continues to outdo itself with the majestic images from space it continues to release – but even by the agency’s lofty standards, a 12-year timelapse of the entire night sky is an impressive achievement.
The images were captured during these years by the NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer) space telescope, which was originally launched in 2009 under the old name “WISE” to study the Universe outside our solar system.
It has since been reused and renamed to track near-Earth objects, including asteroids and comets.
The data collected by NEOWISE gives scientists invaluable insight into how celestial objects move and change over time (time domain astronomy) – whether they are stars exploding or wandering the night sky. , or gas-gobbling black holes.
“If you go out and look at the night sky, it might seem like nothing ever changes, but it doesn’t,” says astronomer Amy Mainzer of the University of Arizona, who is the lead researcher. from NEOWISE.
Readings taken by NEOWISE show the location of hundreds of millions of objects and the amount of infrared light each emits. This information can then be analyzed to understand what an object is doing.
Data from an entire sky is collected every six months (the time it takes the telescope to circle halfway around the Sun), and astronomers have now assembled 18 such maps to form the time frame.
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The maps have been particularly useful for studying brown dwarfs – objects that don’t quite have the mass to initiate the fusion needed to become a bright star, despite starting out in the same way. Those that happen to be closer to the Earth seem to dart faster across the sky than more distant objects, allowing NEOWISE to spot them more easily.
About 260 brown dwarfs have now been identified by the telescope, and thanks to its investigations we know about twice as many Y dwarfs – the coldest brown dwarfs that are of particular interest to astronomers, providing clues to the generation efficiency of stars and its synchronization. in the evolution of our galaxy.
“We never expected the spacecraft to run for this long, and I don’t think we could have anticipated the science that we would be able to do with this much data,” says astronomer Peter Eisenhardt of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. from NASA in California.
We’re also learning more about how stars form thanks to the telescope’s sky scan: Protostars stand out as twinkling objects before becoming stars, and scientists are now tracking nearly 1,000 of them to see how they form. develop.
Then there is perhaps the most fascinating celestial object of all: the black hole. Data from NEOWISE can be used to identify bursts of infrared light from clouds of matter circling around black holesallowing us to see these objects at a greater distance.
The work is far from over and NEOWISE continues its mapping journey, with two more sky maps expected in March 2023. Expect much more to be revealed by the project – activity you cannot see by looking the stars at night.
“Stars are blazing and exploding,” says Mainzer. “Asteroids are racing past. Black holes are tearing stars apart. The Universe is a very busy and active place.”
You can find out more on the NEOWISE project website.
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