This time, NASA has come up with an undeniably cool project as it has recently revealed mind-blowing images of the entire black sky that span over a period of 12 years. Now you might have been thinking, what’s interesting in these images? Hang loose, as the images demonstrate the amazing transformation of cosmic objects like dwarfs, black holes, etc., which have been time-lapsed by NASA by recording them for 12 whopping years. It should be noted that the entire data has been gathered through NASA’s special “Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE)” spacecraft. Have a look at this time-lapsed video given below:
The spacecraft has been well-known for keeping track of near-Earth objects like comets and asteroids, etc., so that they can be monitored and captured easily. You would be amazed to know that the spacecraft revolves halfway around the sun over a period of six months, and on this venture, it can take as many pictures as it can to cover the landscape of an “all-sky” map. Hence, NASA has now compiled around 18 such all-sky maps and got sufficient data from the images in order to make a time-lapse video spanning over 12 years. And the results are just amazing!
While talking to a press release, Amy Mainzer, who is the principal investigator for NEOWISE, said, “If you go outside and look at the night sky, it might seem like nothing ever changes, but that’s not the case. “Stars are flaring and exploding. Asteroids are whizzing by. Black holes are tearing stars apart. The universe is a really busy, active place. ” NEOWISE is such an amazing tool for capturing such images because it has the exceptional capability to even capture the infrared light that most cosmic bodies emit. As we know, the human eye is not capable of observing infrared light, but NEOWISE has this problem solved for us in these pictures.
To that end, a WISE project scientist and NASA astronomer, Peter Eisenhardt, 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.” Hence, one thing that has been cleared from this recent project is that NEOWISE has an outstanding capability to scope out every game and can lead from the front!
