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NASA’s Breathtaking Timelapse Shows How Universe Changed In The Last 12 Years
The universe is more than 13 billion years old, so a 12-year slice would just be a blink of an eye. However, NASA’s timelapse video shows how the universe has changed in the last 12 years. The marquee space agency launched Widefield Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) in 2009 and found star clusters, a plethora of dwarf planets, and helped astronomers locate potentially hazardous asteroids.
But NASA had to put WISE in hibernation after it ran out of coolant in 2011. But some infrared detectors aboard the spacecraft continued to function as intended. In 2013, NASA reactivated the mission with a new name -- NEOWISE intending to characterize 2,000 known asteroids.
WISE’s Contribution To Cosmology
WISE performed wide-field surveys of the cosmos and took six months to capture one image of the night sky. The space agency then combined 18 such images taken over a decade to create a timelapse of the night sky. Together, these images show millions of space objects.
“If you go outside and look at the night sky, it might seem like nothing ever changes, but that’s not the case,” said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for NEOWISE at the University of Arizona. “Stars are flaring and exploding. Asteroids are whizzing by. Black holes are tearing stars apart. The Universe is a really busy, active place.”
WISE has also significantly contributed to the study of brown dwarfs, which aren’t exactly stars but are on their way to becoming one. They are smaller than stars but larger than the largest planets. They can have a mass equivalent to around 13 to 80 Jupiter masses.
What Makes Brown Dwarfs So Intriguing?
Astronomers have theorized that brown dwarfs exist but could only be observed in infrared light. While it’s difficult to perform infrared astronomy from the surface of the Earth, the 2MASS survey managed to find some brown dwarfs. Thanks to infrared observatories such as WISE/NEOWISE, scientists know that there are thousands of brown dwarfs out there.
Researchers are particularly interested in the coolest brown dwarfs because they might be the bridge between planets and stars. These brown dwarfs emit very little energy and have temperatures just a notch above room temperature. NASA merged the WISE and NEOWISE data into a catalog named CATWISE.
The NEOWISE mission continued for much longer than NASA expected. The mission has been going on for a decade and has managed to surprise the researchers with the amount of data it has gathered so far.
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