Black holes gorging on gas, baby stars emerging in thick dust shells, and old stars exploding in powerful supernovas: these are just a few of the types of events NASA’s asteroid and comet researcher NEOWISE witnesses in a decade and a decade released stunning new video.
NASANEOWISE, or Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, orbits about 300 miles (500 kilometers) above us Earthconstantly facing the sky and into the universe. Every six months, the telescope produces a portrait of the entire cosmos that is visible to its infrared detectors. By arranging 18 of these portraits in a sequence, astronomers have created a movie depicting a decade in the life of Stars, galaxies and other objects within range of the telescope.
NEOWISE is an extension of the WISE (Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer) mission launched in 2009. WISE, designed to look beyond ours solar systemran out of coolant needed to maximize the sensitivity of its detectors in 2011. Since the spacecraft was still in good condition and two of its four infrared detectors remained functional With warmer temperatures, NASA repurposed the mission to focus mostly on closer objects comets and asteroids circles the Sun.
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Under the new name NEOWISE, the telescope has been scanning the sky with renewed vigor since 2013 and has far exceeded astronomers’ expectations. Work over the past decade has proven that even without the coolant, the spacecraft’s detectors are still powerful enough to peer far beyond the solar system.
This 12-year span of NEOWISE observations, as captured on video, reveals a vibrant, blinking field of Stars, cometsAsteroids, planets, galaxies and black holes. Overall, NEOWISE maps show hundreds of millions of objects inside and outside of ours Milky Way Galaxy.
“When you go outside and look up at the night sky, it seems like nothing ever changes, but that’s not the case,” said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for NEOWISE at the University of Arizona in Tucson, in a expression (opens in new tab) Tuesday (10/18). “Stars shine and explode. Asteroids whiz by. black holes tear apart stars. The universe is a really busy, active place.”
To be an infrared telescope, just like the larger NASA James Webb Space Telescope NEOWISE, which went live this year, detects the heat given off by celestial objects. Infrared vision is a kind of superpower that allows telescopes to see what is invisible to telescopes that see optical wavelengths (the same wavelengths visible to the human eye). With infrared vision, telescopes can see through thick clouds of gas and dust into regions where stars and planets are forming, allowing astronomers to witness these special events in real time. Although much less powerful than the great Webb, NEOWISE was still able to observe around 1,000 stars forming.
The telescope has also made leaps and bounds in Braun research dwarves. Sometimes referred to as failed stars, brown dwarfs are faint objects too big to be planets but not big enough to ignite nuclear fusion in their cores like stars. NEOWISE sees brown dwarfs within about 70 light years from the sun. Astronomers have spotted over 200 of them near the Sun, helping them estimate the efficiency of star formation in our galaxy.
The telescope also hunted supermassive black holes at the centers of other galaxies. Using the telescope’s data, scientists could develop a new technique to measure the size of gas disks that fall into distant black holes that aren’t bright enough for other telescopes to see.
“We never expected the spacecraft to be operational for so long, and I don’t think we could have anticipated the science that we could do with so much data,” said Peter Eisenhardt, an astronomer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and WISE project scientists said in the same statement.
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