from the it-would-be-wise-to-find-all-NEOs dept.
NASA's NEOWISE mission is continuing to find merciless space rocks:
NASA's Near-Earth Object Wide-field Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) mission has released its second year of survey data. The spacecraft has now characterized a total of 439 NEOs since the mission was re-started in December 2013. Of these, 72 were new discoveries.
[...] Since beginning its survey in December 2013, NEOWISE has measured more than 19,000 asteroids and comets at infrared wavelengths. More than 5.1 million infrared images of the sky were collected in the last year. A new movie, based on the data collected, depicts asteroids and comets observed so far by NEOWISE.
"By studying the distribution of lighter- and darker-colored material, NEOWISE data give us a better understanding of the origins of the NEOs, originating from either different parts of the main asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter or the icier comet populations," said James Bauer, the mission's deputy principal investigator at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Related Stories
NASA is collaborating with Zooniverse to allow the public to search WISE data for "nearby" rogue planets, brown dwarfs, and Planet Nine:
NASA is inviting the public to help search for possible undiscovered worlds in the outer reaches of our solar system and in neighboring interstellar space. A new website, called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9, lets everyone participate in the search by viewing brief movies made from images captured by NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) mission. The movies highlight objects that have gradually moved across the sky.
"There are just over four light-years between Neptune and Proxima Centauri, the nearest star, and much of this vast territory is unexplored," said lead researcher Marc Kuchner, an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "Because there's so little sunlight, even large objects in that region barely shine in visible light. But by looking in the infrared, WISE may have imaged objects we otherwise would have missed."
Previously: No Evidence for 'Planet X', says NASA - "[No] object the size of Saturn or larger exists out to a distance of 10,000 astronomical units (AU), and no object larger than Jupiter exists out to 26,000 AU."
NASA's WISE Spacecraft Discovers Most Luminous Galaxy in Universe
NASA's NEOWISE Mission Finds 72 Additional Near-Earth Objects
Two New Kuiper Belt Objects Boost the Case for "Planet Nine"
The Mysterious 'Planet Nine' Might be Causing the Whole Solar System to Wobble
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Saturday April 09 2016, @01:44AM
Sounds like the Earth has not cleared its orbit like a true planet would. ;-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearing_the_neighbourhood [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday April 09 2016, @02:07AM
Butthurt ensues!
It's all so arbitrary.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2016, @02:21AM
With that event 65Mya in mind, I'm just fine with Earth not vacuuming|hoovering up *everything* around.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2016, @02:14AM
TFA says
Is there a lower limit to the size of an "object", with smaller stuff being called something else?
...or is that size simply the detection limit of the equipment used?
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2016, @04:40AM
Planet's wander in the sky amongst the stars. I have never looked at the sky and seen the Earth wander amongst the stars, have you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09 2016, @12:49PM
Because the Earth is spinning and we're spinning with it, we can't see the "wandering" directly, but it's been measured. Mostly, the Earth just goes in ellipses, almost circles, about the nearest star. A long time ago, some people took a picture of the Earth [wikipedia.org] from a distance, but you can't see any stars at all in that picture. It looks like there's one star, but that one is the Earth.