The universe is over 13 billion years old, so a 12 year slice might seem boring. A timelapse movie from NASA shows how things have changed over the course of a decade. There are stars, asteroids, and black holes.
The WidefieldInfrared Survey Explorer was launched by NASA. Thousands of dwarf planets, star clusters, and other discoveries were made by WISE. NASA put the spaceship in a state of "hibernation" in 2011. Some of the telescopes still work. The mission was changed to NEOWISE in 2013. It was one of the main goals of the organization.
Wide-field surveys of the sky were performed by the spaceship. One image of the night sky is completed every six months. A timelapse of the night sky was created by combining 18 all-sky images. Hundreds of millions of objects are contained together.
Amy Mainzer is the principal investigator for NEOWISE at the University of Arizona. The stars are on fire. steroids are flying There are black holes. The universe is busy.
Brown dwarfs are one of the mission's major contributions to science. Brown dwarfs are substellar objects that will eventually become stars. They didn't gather enough mass to cause fusion. They are larger than the planets. Their Jupiter mass is between 13 and 80.
Astrophysicists thought that there were brown dwarfs, but they were only able to see them through the telescopes. The 2MASS survey was able to find some astronomy on Earth. We know of thousands of them thanks to the telescopes.
The gap between stars and planets is bridged by the cool brown dwarf. Brown dwarfs emit very little energy. The room temperature is only one part of the equation. The Y class brown dwarfs were discovered by WISE.
The data from WISE and NEOWISE were combined into a single catalogue. CWISEP J1935-1546 is a brown dwarf with an estimated temperature of 270 to 347 K.
Citizen scientists have been involved in brown dwarf activities. Two of the most unusual brown dwarfs were discovered by citizen scientists. Scientists and volunteers found them in 2020 as part of the Backyard Worlds project.
The strangest brown dwarf was found in 2020. They called it the "accident" because they found it. The Accident is between 10 and 13 billion years old. The early Universe is reflected by its metallicity, not the modern Universe. The heavier elements created by stars over billions of years have higher metallicity.
The Accident is the first of its kind, but it won't be the last. Many of them are hiding in the dark.
The mission has lasted more than expected. They thought it would last about two years until it ran out of water. The mission has been going on for a decade after it was re-commissioned. The mission is long and the amount of data gathered is surprising.
Peter Eisenhardt is an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the project scientist for the WISE project.
If you want to help scientists find one of the elusive, ancient brown dwarfs, check out Backyard Worlds: Planet Nine.
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