NASA has just released time-lapse photos of the entire sky over 12 years, capturing the evolution of fascinating cosmic objects, such as brown dwarfs and even black holes. To accomplish this feat, NASA used data collected by the Near-Earth Wide Field Infrared Detector (NEOWISE).

NASA has just released time-lapse photos of the entire sky over 12 years, capturing the evolution of fascinating cosmic objects such as brown dwarf or even black holes.

To accomplish this feat, NASA used data collected by the Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Detector (NEOWISE). As the name suggests, its main purpose is to monitor near-Earth objects such as asteroids and comets and .

Every six months, the spacecraft completes a journey around the sun halfway, taking a lot of photos for the "all-sky" map every time. Now, NASA has combined 18 such all-sky maps to form an ultimate, all-inclusive sky map that spans more than a decade. "If you go outside and look at the night sky, it may seem like nothing has changed, but it is not the case," said Amy Mainzel, principal investigator of

NEOWISE (Near-Earth Wide Field Infrared Detector), in a press release. "If you go outside and look at the night sky, it may seem that nothing has changed, but it is not the case."

"Stars are burning and exploding," she added. "Asteroids whizz by. Black holes are tearing apart the stars. The universe is a very busy and active place."

However, most of these events are unaware of the naked eye. Therefore, NEOWISE captured the infrared light emitted by these cosmic celestial bodies by reusing the infrared sensors on its predecessor WISE. "These results not only stunned us, but are also priceless resources for astronomers, especially in the field of time-domain astronomy. Time-domain astronomy is a discipline that studies how celestial bodies change over time."

NEOWISE and its predecessors have proven indispensable in recent research on the universe. For example, in 2012, it discovered millions of supermassive black holes in distant galaxies.

2020, NEOWISE was also used to investigate brown dwarfs, which are essentially dysplastic stars that have never obtained enough mass for nuclear fusion . "We never expected the spacecraft to run for so long, and I don't think we could expect that we could use so much data for scientific research," said Peter Eisenhardt, a project scientist at WISE and NASA astronomer, in a press release. "We never expected that the spacecraft would run for so long, and I don't think we could expect that we could use so much data for scientific research."

Obviously, this crumpled spacecraft is not only capable of taking some amazing images, but we can't wait to see what else it hides to surprise people.