(ORDO NEWS) — The Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE, now Neowise) has detected invisible movements in space.
So far, the spacecraft has generated an “all-sky” map showing the location and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects.
NASA said that not only images, but even a video stream consisting of a sequence of images, acts as the main resource that can detect distant objects that have changed position or brightness over time.
“If you go outside and look at the night sky, it may seem that nothing is changing, but it is not.
Stars flare and explode. Asteroids are passing by. Black holes tear stars apart.
The universe is a really vibrant, active place,” Neowise principal investigator Amy Mainzer said in a statement.
The mission, launched in 2009, used cryogenically cooled detectors to increase infrared sensitivity when scanning for objects outside the solar system.
The original goal of the mission was to map nearby stars and some of the brightest galaxies in the universe.
However, in 2013, the device was refocused on tracking asteroids and other near-Earth objects.
The Neowise spacecraft compiled a catalog of objects, consisting of 12 maps. They have been used to study brown dwarfs, as well as objects lurking near the solar system.
At 65 light-years from the Sun, scientists have discovered 200 brown dwarfs.
The initial study found millions of supermassive black holes at the centers of distant galaxies, allowing more to be learned about the properties of black holes.
“We never imagined that the spacecraft would operate for so long, and we could not imagine that we would collect such an amount of data,” said astronomer Peter Eisenhardt from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
What else might be lurking in the darkness of space?
Earlier, American astronomers from the state of Ohio found out that in the Milky Way galaxy there is a huge number of rogue planets that drift freely in outer space. It turned out that there are much more such planets than there are stars in the galaxy.
Scientists are probably worried about this state of affairs, since at any moment an uninvited guest can visit the solar system, emerging from the darkness.
Currently, a team of astronomers is preparing to launch the Nancy Grace Roman space observatory, which will allow scientists to identify space bodies drifting in space. True, no one knows what to do if they are discovered.
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