Some will think that, at night, the sky does not change. That the mantle that covers us in the heights only shows stars, in different positions during different days, the Moon and little more than that. Nevertheless, NASA has revealed how the night sky changed over a decade through a time-lapse.
As explained in the report published on the website of Digital Trendsthe night sky is active, changing and is visible even on scales of years.
Recently, the US space agency shared an animation in time-lapse or time-lapse format that shows the changes in the night sky over a period of more than a decade.
This map of the entire sky shows how it has changed between the launch of the Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) spacecraft in 2009 and today. using the data collected by the NEOWISE.
“The universe is a very busy and active place”
Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for NEOWISE at the University of Arizona, spoke about the night sky in a release: “If you go out and look at the night sky, it may seem like nothing ever changes, but that’s not the case.”.
“The stars are shining and exploding. Asteroids zoom by. Black holes are destroying stars. The universe is a very busy and active place”, he explained.
NEOWISE was originally a mission to search for objects outside our Solar System. NASA’s WISE telescope explored the entire sky in the infrared from its launch in 2009 until it completed its primary mission in 2011, but the telescope was still working so it was reactivated and renamed in 2013.
Currently, the telescope is used to search for nearby asteroids and comets, but it also provides images like the following, a mosaic of photos that cover the entire sky.