NEOWISE: Revealing Changes in the Universe

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New time-lapse movies from NASA’s NEOWISE mission give astronomers the opportunity to see objects, like stars and black holes, as they move and change over time. The videos include previously hidden brown dwarfs, a feeding black hole, a dying star, a star-forming region, and a brightening star. They combine more than 10 years of NEOWISE observations and 18 all-sky images, enabling a long-term analysis and a deeper understanding of the universe.

0:44 – NEOWISE all-sky scan animation
1:03 – Feeding black hole
1:14 – Pulsing star reaches the end of its life
1:21 – Protostars in star-forming region
1:34 – Brown dwarf moves across the sky
2:00 – Unexplained stellar brightening

The NEOWISE mission uses a space telescope to hunt for asteroids and comets, including those that could pose a threat to Earth. Launched in December 2009 as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, the space telescope was originally designed to survey the sky in infrared, detecting asteroids, stars and some of the faintest galaxies in space. WISE did so successfully until completing its primary mission in February 2011.

Observations resumed in December 2013, when the telescope was taken out of hibernation and re-purposed for the NEOWISE project as an instrument to study near-Earth objects, or NEOs, as well as more distant asteroids and comets.

Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
WISE-NEOWISE movies compiled by Dan Caselden