It isn't the case that the sky above is unchanging. The night sky can be seen on scales of years. The animation shows the changes in the night sky over a period of more than a decade. The all-sky map shows how the sky has changed since the launch of the NEOWISE spaceship in 2009.
There are changes in the universe.
Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for NEOWISE at the University of Arizona, said that if you look at the night sky, it doesn't seem like anything has changed. The stars are on fire. steroids are flying There are black holes. There is a lot of activity in the universe.
A mission to search for objects outside our solar system was the original purpose of the Near-Earth Object Wide FieldInfrared Survey Explorer. NASA used to use the space-based WISE telescope to look for asteroids and comets after it completed its primary mission in 2011. The mission has given a lot of data showing how the sky changes over time.
Peter Eisenhardt is an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the project scientist for the WISE project.
Black holes, which are in the process of forming, and previously hidden brown dwarfs have been identified using data from the mission. The data was used to identify almost 100 brown dwarfs in the Backyard Worlds project.
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