WISE/NEOWISE Stories

Researchers have utilized infrared survey data to refine the asteroid’s size and surface brightness in support of the Nov. 1 encounter by NASA’s Lucy mission. NASA’s Lucy mission will soon have its first asteroid encounter as the spacecraft travels through…

A star nearing the end of its life swelled up and absorbed a Jupiter-size planet. In about 5 billion years, our Sun will go through a similar end-of-life transition.

NEO Surveyor is the first purpose-built space telescope that will advance NASA’s planetary defense efforts by finding and tracking hazardous near-Earth objects. A space telescope designed to search for the hardest-to-find asteroids and comets that stray into Earth’s orbital neighborhood,…

Pictures of the sky can show us cosmic wonders; movies can bring them to life. Movies from NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope are revealing motion and change across the sky. Every six months, NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer,…

Brown dwarfs aren’t quite stars and aren’t quite planets, and a new study suggests there might be more of them lurking in our galaxy than scientists previously thought. A new study offers a tantalizing explanation for how a peculiar cosmic…

Brown dwarfs aren’t quite stars and aren’t quite planets, and a new study suggests there might be more of them lurking in our galaxy than scientists previously thought. A new study offers a tantalizing explanation for how a peculiar cosmic…

Using observations from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), an international team of astronomers has discovered a trio of hot worlds larger than Earth orbiting a much younger version of our Sun called TOI 451. The system resides in the…

Is our solar system located in a typical Milky Way neighborhood? Scientists have gotten closer to answering this question, thanks to the NASA-funded Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 project, a “citizen science” collaboration between professional scientists and members of the public. Scientists tapped into…

Matter swirling around supermassive black holes creates bursts of light that “echo” in nearby dust clouds. These traveling signals could serve as a new cosmic yardstick. When you look up at the night sky, how do you know whether the…

We’ve never met some of the Sun’s closest neighbors until now. In a new study, astronomers report the discovery of 95 objects known as brown dwarfs, many within a few dozen light-years of the Sun. They’re well outside the solar…