NASA Just Unveiled an Epic 12-Year Timelapse of The Entire Sky

Even by NASA's high standards, a 12-year timelapse of the entire night sky is an impressive achievement.

The imagery has been captured over the course of those years by the NEOWISE space telescope, which was originally launched in 2009.

It is now used to track near- Earth objects.

Data collected by NEOWISE gives scientists an insight into how the stars are moving and changing over time, whether that's stars exploding or wandering across the night sky.

"If you look at the night sky, it might seem like nothing has changed, but that's not the case," says Amy Mainzer, an astronomer from the University of Arizona.

The location of hundreds of millions of objects is shown in the readings taken by NEOWISE. It is possible to figure out what an object is doing.

An entire sky's worth of data is collected every six months, and the time it takes the telescope to travel half the way around the Sun is one of the reasons why 18 maps have been created.

The maps are useful for studying brown dwarfs because they don't have the mass to spark the fusion needed to become a brightly-burning star. Those that are closer to Earth seem to zip faster across the sky than objects farther away.

Around 260 brown dwarfs have now been identified by the telescope, and thanks to its investigations we know about twice as many Y-dwarfs, which provide clues on the efficiency of star generation and its timing in the evolution of our universe.

Peter Eisenhardt is an astronomer from the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

We're learning more about how stars form through the telescope's sky scanning, and scientists are now tracking almost 1000 of them to see how they develop.

The black hole is the most compelling of them all. We can see the objects at a greater distance with the help of data from NEOWISE.

The work is still being done and there are two more sky maps due in March. There will be more to be revealed by the project, which you can't see when looking up at the stars.

Mainzer says the stars are blowing up. The asteroids are moving fast. There are black holes. The universe is busy.

You can find more information at the project website.