Black holes gobbling gas, baby stars emerging within thick dust shrouds and old stars exploding in powerful supernovas are just a few of the types of events witnessed in a decade by NASA's asteroid and comet explorer.
NASA's Near-Earth object Wide FieldInfrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, is about 300 miles above Earth and is constantly looking into the universe. The telescope takes a picture of the whole universe every six months. Astronomers have created a movie depicting a decade in the life of stars and other objects by arranging 18 portraits into a sequence.
The extension of the WISE mission is called NEOWISE. In order to maximize the sensitivity of its detectors, WISE ran out of the coolant it needed to operate. NASA diverted the mission to focus on comets and asteroids because the spacecraft was still in good health and two of its four detectors were still working.
The largest map of the universe is demystifying it.
The telescope has been using a new name, NeoWISE, since the beginning of the year and has exceeded the expectations of the astronomer. The last 10 years of work have shown that the detectors are still powerful enough to see beyond the solar system.
The video shows a field of stars, comets, asteroids, planets, and black holes over the course of a 12 year period. The maps show hundreds of millions of objects inside and outside of the universe.
"If you look at the night sky, it might seem like nothing has changed, but that's not the case," said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for NEOWISE at the University of Arizona in Tucson. The stars are on fire. steroids are flying There are black holes. There is a lot of activity in the universe.
Similar to the larger NASA James Webb Space Telescope that entered operations this year, NEOWISE is a telescope that can detect heat from the stars. The same wavelength that is visible to the human eye can be seen through a telescope with the help of a type of vision called IR vision. Astronomers can observe the formation of stars and planets in real time with the help of telescopes that can see through thick clouds of gas and dust. The NEOWISE could see about 1,000 stars.
The research of brown dwarfs has improved thanks to the telescope. Sometimes called failed stars, brown dwarfs are dim objects that are too large to be planets, but not large enough to ignite nuclear fusion. There are brown dwarfs within 70 light years of the sun. Astronomers found over 200 hundred of them in the sun's vicinity, which helps them gauge the efficiency of star formation.
There were black holes at the center of other galaxies. The data from the telescope could be used to create a new technique for measuring the size of the disks of gas falling into black holes.
"I don't think we could have anticipated the science we'd be able to do with this much data," said Peter Eisenhardt, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
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