NASA's all-new atlas unveils stars and galaxies
Universe seems to have more than any of us can imagine. NASA's new atlas has revealed more than half a trillion objects throughout the universe, from stars to asteroids. This entire catalog of the sky was captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission on Wednesday. It includes 18000 images and data encompassing more than 563 million stars, galaxies, asteroids, planets, and other objects in the sky, some of which have never been identified or seen.
WISE was a collaboration of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of California Los Angeles. This 10-foot unmanned satellite of 1400 pounds was launched into space on 14th Dec, 2009 and mapped the sky in 2010. WISE basically acts as a set of powerful night-vision glasses and captures all the images and datas from nearby asteroids to distant galaxies invisible to the human eye. (Read more).
In recent time, WISE observations have led to the discovery of elusive failed stars, or Y-dwarfs. Astronomers' were tracking these stars for quite long. Y-dwarfs were in a state of cooling since their formation. These do not shine in visible light and could not be spotted until WISE mapped the sky with its infrared vision. WISE also discovered fewer mid-size near-Earth asteroids which equals to 90 percent of the largest of the asteroids being indentified.
These datas revealed can be accessed online and downloaded in chunks. Nevertheless, NASA aims to present the entire database in the form of a compressed text book for bulk download in the future. The size of the book will be 321GB and to further make the data easier to use, NASA has put up videos online. (Read complete story)
In addition to this, NASA will also be supplying programming interfaces so that the programmers are able to develop applications that can download WISE data.
Through the image catalog provided by NASA, users would be able to:
- Zoom into images
- Save them to disk
- Change the color palette
- Bring up metadata on the images
- Select areas for cropping and doing further analysis on the image statistics
- Change the image rotation
- Calculate the distance between any two objects
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