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The huge map, made up of images collected in 12 years, will tell astronomers the location of hundreds of millions of space objects outside our solar system.
NASA shows an incredible 'time-lapse' of the sky (VIDEO)
NASA scientists developed an amazing map of the night sky using images collected by the space telescope on its Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission over 12 years, showing the Changes experienced by stars, black holes and other celestial objects in their position and brightness over time, the US space agency reported on Tuesday.
How is the sky mapping done?
According to the creators of the mapping project, NEOWISE completes half of its journey around the Sun every six months. During its orbital journey, the probe takes pictures of space in all directions and in the end these are joined to form a map of “the whole sky” . Likewise, they detailed that, until now, they have combined close to 18 maps in one and that they plan to use another two, which will be published in March next year.
“Yes you go out and look at the sky at night, it may seem that nothing changes, but this is not the case”, commented the researcher of the University of Arizona, Amy Mainzer, who explained that “the universe is a very busy and active place”, since “stars are shining and exploding”, “asteroids are whizzing by” and “black holes are destroying stars “.
The huge map will tell astronomers the location of hundreds of millions of space objects outside our solar system and provide information on the amount of infrared light it emits each. In the case of brown dwarfs (substellar objects that do not have enough mass to become bright stars), NEOWISE has detected approximately 260, which represented a great help for specialists who wish to understand its origin and evolution in our galaxy.
The space telescope measurements have also made it possible to study the material that makes up protostars, which are hot gas objects about to become stars. Currently, scientists track 1.060 protostars to learn about their early stages of formation.
Finally, the data obtained from NEOWISE, together with a technique known as ‘echo mapping’
, have been used to analyze the disks of gas that revolve around distant black holes, which, being too small and far away, cannot be identified by any telescope. “We never anticipated that the spacecraft spacecraft would be operating for so long and I think we could not have anticipated the science that we would be able to do with this amount of data,” concluded NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory astronomer Peter Eisenhardt. ) The NEOWISE space probe was launched in December 2010 under the name of WISE, to study asteroids and comets, as well as other objects that are outside our system sun theme. The WISE used infrared light sensors that were cooled by cryogenic applications with hydrogen. However, in 2010 the refrigerant ran out, so the following year it was put into mode of hibernation. In 2013, it was decided to reactivate the device, under the name NEOWISE, to acquire information on comets and near-Earth objects that could pose a threat to our planet. If you liked it, share it with your friends!
