NASA just unveiled an epic 12-year time-lapse of the entire sky

NASA continues to outdo itself with the majestic images of space it consistently releases — but even by the agency’s high standards, a 12-year time-lapse of the entire night sky is an impressive feat.

The images were taken during those years by the NEOWISE (Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer) space telescope, originally launched in 2009 under the former name “WISE” to study the universe outside our solar system.

It has since been repurposed and renamed to track near-Earth objects like asteroids and comets.

The data collected by NEOWISE gives scientists an invaluable insight into how celestial objects move and change over time (time-domain astronomy) — whether they’re stars exploding or wandering the night sky, or black holes gorging on gas.

“When you go outside and look at the night sky, it seems like nothing ever changes, but that’s not the case,” says University of Arizona astronomer Amy Mainzer, who is the principal investigator for NEOWISE.

The readings taken by NEOWISE show the position of hundreds of millions of objects and the amount of infrared light each one emits. This information can then be analyzed to find out what an object is doing.

An entire sky’s worth of data is collected every six months (the time it takes for the telescope to circle halfway around the sun), and astronomers have now stitched 18 of those maps together to create the time-lapse.

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The maps have been particularly useful for studying brown dwarfs – objects that don’t quite have the mass to trigger the fusion necessary to become a brightly burning star, although they began their existence in a similar way. Those that happen to be closer to Earth appear to be hurtling across the sky faster than more distant objects, making it easier for NEOWISE to spot them.

The telescope has now identified around 260 brown dwarfs, and thanks to its investigations we know about twice as many Y dwarfs – the coldest brown dwarfs, which are of particular interest to astronomers and provide clues to the efficiency of star formation and its timing in the evolution of our galaxy.

“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,” says astronomer Peter Eisenhardt of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

The telescope’s sky scan also tells us more about how stars form: protostars emerge as flickering objects before they become stars, and scientists are now tracking nearly 1,000 of them to see how they evolve.

Then there is perhaps the most intriguing celestial object of all – the black hole. Data from NEOWISE can be used to identify flares of infrared light from the swirling clouds of matter black holesallowing us to see these objects from a greater distance.

The work is far from complete and NEOWISE continues its mapping journey, with two more sky maps due in March 2023. Expect the project to reveal a lot more – activities you can’t see when you look up at the stars at night.

“Stars shine and explode,” says Mainzer. “Asteroids are whizzing by. Black holes tear stars apart. The universe is a very busy, active place.”

More information can be found on the NEOWISE project website.