![]() The survey captured images of nearly 750 million asteroids, stars and galaxies. The WISE mission operated from 2010 through early 2011, during which time it performed two full scans of the sky - with essentially a six-month gap between scans. Some of these 3,525 objects also were found in the Luhman study, which catalogued 762 objects. Kirkpatrick is lead author of the second paper, also in the Astrophysical Journal. “We’re finding objects that were totally overlooked before,” said Davy Kirkpatrick of NASA’s Infrared and Processing Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California. This animation was produced by New York Film Academy, Los Angeles Campus. The field of view is 5 arcminutes on a side with north up and east to the left. These archival images correspond to the First Generation Digitized Sky Survey (DSS1) from 1953, the Second Generation Digitized Sky Survey (DSS2) from 19, the Two Micron All Sky Survey (2MASS) from 1999, and WISE itself, from 2010. Pauses within the animation show actual, archival data on which the object was recovered after its discovery in 2014 by WISE. The artists’ animation shows the L subdwarf as it would appear to the human eye. This object belongs to a rare class of old stars known as “L subdwarfs,” which are moving with high speed due to their many gravitational encounters with larger objects over the course of their lifetimes. ![]() The projected path of the fast-moving, nearby star, dubbed WISEA J204027.30+695924.1 is shown. The motion of one of the new neighboring stars discovered by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) over more than 50 years can be seen in this animation, which shows where the star was in photos taken as early as 1953. ![]() The second WISE study, which concentrated on objects beyond our solar system, found 3,525 stars and brown dwarfs within 500 light-years of our sun. “Neighboring star systems that have been hiding in plain sight just jump out in the WISE data,” said Ned Wright of the University of California, Los Angeles, the principal investigator of the mission. A second study reveals several thousand new residents in our sun’s “backyard,” consisting of stars and cool bodies called brown dwarfs. “The outer solar system probably does not contain a large gas giant planet, or a small, companion star,” said Kevin Luhman of the Center for Exoplanets and Habitable Worlds at Penn State University, University Park, Pennsylvania, author of a paper in the Astrophysical Journal describing the results.īut searches of the WISE catalog are not coming up empty. Credit: NASA/JPL/Gemini Observatory/AURA/NSF This is the closest star system to be discovered in nearly a century. It appeared to be a single object, but a sharper image from Gemini Observatory in Chile (inset), revealed that it was binary star system, consisting of a pair of brown dwarfs. The third closest star system to the sun, called WISE J104915.57-531906, is at the center of the larger image, which was taken by NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). In addition to “Planet X,” the body had garnered other nicknames, including “Nemesis” and “Tyche.” ![]() Researchers previously had theorized about the existence of this large, but unseen celestial body, suspected to lie somewhere beyond the orbit of Pluto. Using data from NASA’s WISE exporter, two newly published studies reveal thousands of new stars, but no evidence of “planet X.”Īfter searching hundreds of millions of objects across our sky, NASA’s Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) has turned up no evidence of the hypothesized celestial body in our solar system commonly dubbed “Planet X.” But WISE would not have been able to see a Jupiter-mass planet residing at 100,000 au - it would have been too faint. For example, if a Jupiter-mass planet existed at 10,000 au, WISE would have easily seen it. Bodies with larger masses are brighter, and therefore can be seen at greater distances. Data from NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, has found no evidence for a hypothesized body sometimes referred to as “Planet X.” This chart shows what types of objects WISE can and cannot see at certain distances from our sun. ![]()
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