A stunning 12-year time-lapse video of the entire sky, created by N.A.S.A, shows how the environment around us has changed.
A time-lapse video created by a N.A.S.A satellite observatory demonstrates how the sky has altered over the past ten years. Photographs of the cosmos’ wonders let us see them, but moving pictures let us experience them.
Videos of the sky’s motion and change are being produced by N.A.S.A’s NEOWISE satellite telescope. The Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE), a N.A.S.A satellite that orbits the Sun every six months, takes pictures in all directions.
This map contains hundreds of millions of objects after the photographs have been combined. In essence, researchers used 18 all-sky maps (the 19th and 20th will be released in March 2023) to create a time-lapse movie showing changes over the last ten years.
Astronomers may learn a great deal about the universe from each map. However, they become even more valuable tools for teaching pupils about it when they are seen as a time-lapse. Time-domain astronomy can be used to compare the maps and find far-off objects that have altered in brightness or location over time.
“The night sky appears to alter relatively minimally,” said Amy Mainzer, principle investigator of NEOWISE at the University of Arizona. “Stars are constantly erupting and flashing throughout the sky.” Asteroids fly by. Black holes are tearing up stars. “The universe is a tremendously lively and busy place.”
As an observatory tasked with searching our galaxy for extrasolar objects and doing research on them, WISE was launched in 2009. The original purpose of NEOWISE was to retrieve WISE asteroid detections through data processing.
The spacecraft’s cryogenically cooled detectors picked up infrared light. The world’s brightest galaxies and nearby, cool stars generate infrared light, which is invisible to the human eye. When the coolant on board ran out in 2011, the WISE mission came to an end, although the spacecraft and some of its infrared detectors continued to function.
As a result, N.A.S.A reconfigured the device in 2013 to track asteroids and other near-Earth objects. Both the mission and the spacecraft were renamed NEOWISE. Despite the shift, astronomers continue to investigate objects outside our solar system using data from infrared telescopes.
As part of the CatWISE project, a catalogue of objects from 12 NEOWISE all-sky maps was provided in 2020. Brown dwarfs, which are distributed around the galaxy and lurk in the dark near to our Sun, are studied in this collection.
Even though they originate like stars, brown dwarfs do not undergo the fusion process that causes stars to light. Brown dwarfs appear to travel quicker than more distant stars moving at the same speed because of their proximity to Earth.
Brown dwarfs can be found in the catalogue by looking for things that move among billions of others. Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 is a companion project to CatWISE that invites citizen scientists to pore through NEOWISE data.
Using WISE’s original two all-sky scans, some 200 brown dwarfs were discovered within 65 light-years of our Sun. As a result of the new maps, 60 more Y-dwarfs, the coldest brown dwarfs, have been detected.
Warmer brown dwarfs could provide a different story about how and when they formed than Y-dwarfs. As a result of these discoveries, our solar neighbourhood is now ornamented with a variety of objects. A more complete census of brown dwarfs close to the Sun allows scientists to calculate how efficient star creation is in our galaxy.
A decade of studying the sky has also helped scientists comprehend how stars emerge. Dusty blankets shroud protostars as they evolve into stars, allowing NEOWISE to look inside their obscuring cocoons.
Protostars flicker and flare as a result of the accumulation of mass in the dust clouds that surround them throughout time. Astronomers use NEOWISE to follow the lifecycles of roughly 1,000 protostars over time to better understand how stars form.
Black holes are now better understood thanks to NEOWISE data. Millions of supermassive black holes were found at the centers of far-off galaxies as part of the original WISE survey. Recently, the size of hot gas discs encircling distant black holes was measured using NEOWISE data and an echo mapping method.
A telescope cannot see these objects because they are too small. Overall, NEOWISE has made significant contributions to our understanding of the solar system, neighbouring stars, as well as distant, hidden objects like supermassive black holes.
