NASA keeps outdoing itself with the magnificent photographs of space it releases. NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) shared a 12-year timelapse of the whole night sky.
NEOWISE satellite telescope, formerly known as WISE and launched in 2009 to investigate the universe beyond our solar system, has collected images during those years, Science Alert mentioned.
Since then, it has been renamed and used to track asteroids and comets, among other near-Earth objects.
NASA NEOWISE Shares Stunning Sky's Timelapse
Every six months, NASA's NEOWISE spacecraft completes one full orbit of the Sun while taking pictures from all directions.
According to the space agency, an "all-sky" map created from those images may be pieced together to show the position and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects.
Using 18 of the all-sky maps the spacecraft has produced, scientists have created a time-lapse video of the sky. In March 2023, the 19th and 20th will be made public.
The sky has changed over the past ten years, as shown in the film below this page.
This mosaic comprises images covering the entire sky, taken by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) as part of WISE’s 2012 All-Sky Data Release. By observing the entire sky, WISE can search for faint objects, like distant galaxies, or survey groups of cosmic objects.
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Once decades of mapping are finished and taken into consideration collectively, that activity becomes apparent.
According to NASA (per Petapixel), these timelapse allow astronomers to observe celestial phenomena like stars and black holes as they travel and change across space and time.
It is one of the best methods for astronomers to conduct in-depth investigations of the cosmos over a lengthy period of time.
The mosaic shown here is an infrared image taken by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) of the whole sky.
According to NASA, infrared light has longer wavelengths than those visible to the human eye.
It described how brown dwarfs and other cosmic objects like the gas and dust clouds where stars develop emit infrared light.
About NEOWISE
NEOWISE is an infrared telescope that detects the heat radiated by astronomical objects, similar to the larger NASA James Webb Space Telescope that began operations this year, Space.com said.
As a type of superpower, infrared vision enables telescopes to view objects that optical observatories sensing optical wavelengths cannot (the same wavelengths visible to the human eye).
Telescopes with infrared vision can look into regions where stars and planets originate through dense clouds of gas and dust, enabling astronomers to observe these unique phenomena in real time.
Despite being somewhat less powerful than the great Webb, NEOWISE could see roughly 1,000 newborn stars.
The telescope also looked for supermassive black holes in other galaxies' centers. Scientists might create a new method for estimating the size of the gas disks going into far-off black holes, which are not light enough to be seen by other telescopes, using the data collected by the telescope.
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