Pictures of the sky can reveal the grandeur of the cosmos, but movies can bring them to life. Movies from NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope are unveiling motion and change across the sky.

NASAs NEOWISE Space Telescope Takes 12-Year Time-Lapse Movie of Entire Sky

NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, spacecraft completes one trip halfway around the Sun every six months, taking images in all directions. Once stitched together, those images form an “all-sky” map showing the location and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects. Using 18 all-sky maps produced by the spacecraft (with the 19th and 20th to be released in March 2023), astronomers have constructed what is essentially a time-lapse movie of the sky, revealing changes that span a decade. Each all-sky map is a tremendously valuable resource for astronomers by itself.  NASA’s NEOWISE Space Telescope , However, when viewed in sequence as a time-lapse, they serve as an even more powerful tool for attempting to unlock the secrets of the universe. Comparing the maps can reveal distant objects that have changed position or brightness over time.

This is known as time-domain astronomy. “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 in Tucson. “Stars are flaring and exploding. Asteroids are whizzing by. Black holes are tearing stars apart. The universe is a really busy, active place.” NEOWISE was originally a data processing project to retrieve asteroid detections and characteristics from WISE – an observatory launched in 2009 and tasked with scanning the entire sky to find and study objects outside our solar system. Cryogenically cooled detectors in the spacecraft were sensitive to infrared light. Infrared light is not visible to the human eye. It is radiated by a plethora of cosmic objects, including cool, nearby stars and some of the most luminous galaxies in the universe. NASA’s NEOWISE Space Telescope , The WISE mission ended in 2011 after the onboard coolant – needed for some infrared observations – ran out, but the spacecraft and some of its infrared detectors were still functional. So in 2013, NASA repurposed it to track asteroids and other near-Earth objects, or NEOs. Both the mission and the spacecraft received a new name.

Source: This news is originally publihsed by scitechdaily

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