WISE surveyed the entire sky in the mid-infrared with far greater sensitivity than any previous mission or program ever has. The WISE survey consisted of over a million images, from which hundreds of millions of astronomical objects are catalogued, providing a vast storehouse of knowledge about the Solar System, the Milky Way, and the Universe.
Within our Solar System, asteroids absorb much of the sunlight that hits them and heat up to glow in the mid-infrared. WISE was able to measure the diameters of more than 100,000 asteroids. WISE also saw the infrared light absorbed and reemitted by dust, called Zodiacal Light, as well as the debris trails of comets.
Some of the material making up the Sun's planetary debris disk is left over from the formation of the Solar System, and some is freshly generated by collisions between the asteroids and planets that exist today. Beyond the Solar System, WISE provided a complete inventory of nearby young stars and their dusty disks, as well as of the debris disks associated with planetary systems around thousands of older nearby stars.
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In the neighborhood of the Sun, WISE discovered stars cooler and dimmer than the Sun, which are thought to be the most common types of stars by far. Brown Dwarfs are stars lacking the mass needed to fuse hydrogen into helium like visible stars do. They slowly radiate away their heat of formation, cooling from red hot to room temperature and below. WISE will find many such Brown Dwarf stars in the solar neighborhood, most of which have yet to be discovered. Some may even be closer to the Sun than any other star previously known.
Interstellar dust prevents us from seeing more than a few percent of the stars in the Milky Way in visible light. However, infrared light passes through the dust allowing WISE to map the global structure of our Galaxy. WISE also detected infrared light emitted by this interstellar dust, producing very good maps of dust in the Galaxy.
Beyond the Milky Way, WISE imagery allows for the study of the structures and star formation histories of thousands of nearby galaxies.
Farther away, WISE finds the most luminous galaxies in the Universe, called Ultra-Luminous Infrared Galaxies (ULIRGs), which result from the merger of galaxies triggering intense bursts of star formation, most of which is enshrouded by clouds of dust. WISE also probes and characterize the population of active galactic nuclei (AGN) that are obscured heavily by dust and that have not yet been discovered by studies in the visible or ultraviolet parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Clusters of galaxies found in the WISE survey allow for further study of the mysterious dark energy that is responsible for the acceleration of the Universe.
