NASA releases unbelievable 12-year time-lapse of the entire sky
Published
| Last updated
Featured Image Credit: NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory/YouTube
NASA has released an unbelievable time-lapse video of the entire sky, captured over 12 years.
Twice a year, the space agency's telescope NEOWISE (or Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, to use its full but less catchy name) completes a trip halfway around the Sun, capturing images in all directions as it goes.
Those images have been stitched together to form an 'all-sky' map, which shows the location and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects. Using a total of 18 all-sky maps produced by the spacecraft, scientists have created a time-lapse movie of the sky, revealing how it has changed over this period.
Check it out here:
Loading…
By comparing the maps, scientists can identify distant objects that have changed position or brightness over time, in what's 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."
So at least we're not alone - in being stupidly busy on Earth, that is.
The telescope's images captured over this period have also contributed to star formation studies.
NASA explained: "NEOWISE can peer into the dusty blankets swaddling protostars, or balls of hot gas that are well on their way to becoming stars.
"Over the course of years, protostars flicker and flare as they accumulate more mass from the dust clouds that surround them.
"Scientists are conducting long-term monitoring of almost 1,000 protostars with NEOWISE to gain insights into the early stages of star formation."
On top of this, NEOWISE's data has also improved understanding of black holes.
Millions of supermassive black holes have been discovered at the centres of distant galaxies, and in a recent study, scientists used NEOWISE data and a technique called echo mapping to measure the size of disks of hot, glowing gas surrounding distant black holes.
Peter Eisenhardt, an astronomer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and WISE project scientist, said: "We never anticipated that the spacecraft would be operating this long, and I don't think we could have anticipated the science we'd be able to do with this much data."
If you have a story you want to tell, send it to UNILAD via [email protected]
