Toronto is the crane capital of North America — but construction is starting to slow

Toronto had 230 active cranes in the third quarter of 2022, five times more than second place Los Angeles, according to RLB’s biannual Crane Index of 14 North American cities.

By Fares Alghoul 

Staff Reporter
Thu., Oct. 20, 2022

Despite rising interest rates leading to a decline in new condo sales, Toronto has the highest number of operating tower cranes in North America, a new report by property and consultancy firm Rider Levett Bucknall shows.

Toronto had 230 active cranes in the sky in the third quarter of 2022. That is five times higher than Los Angeles, which ranked second on the RLB’s biannual Crane Index of 14 North American cities.

Even though there were almost nine per cent fewer cranes than in the first quarter of this year, when there were 252, Toronto has almost as many cranes as the other 13 markets combined, the report said. It attributed the drop to fewer new condo sales and mixed-use projects, along with staffing issues and strikes in Ontario’s construction sector.

The report notes that as the housing market cools, it will be partially offset by investment in non-residential business, such as government investments in transportation infrastructure. As well Ontario’s economy is expected to grow four per cent this year and 3.2 per cent the following year, according to the report.

“The index is a general indication of construction activity in each of the cities researched in our report,” said Mel Yungblut of RLB Toronto’s office of the twice-yearly report. “It is a simple view of construction activity in the local market,” he said adding “Toronto has a very active residential market that is reflected in the total crane count.”

But industry experts aren’t so upbeat about the future of construction in Toronto and the Greater Toronto Area.

Ontario wants to build 1.5 million homes in the next decade. Getting them built will not be easy given the lengthy process of regulations and approval, says David Wilkes, president of Building Industry and Land Development Association (BILD), adding a study by BILD found that it takes on average 32 months from the time the developer submits the application to build until it gets approval.

“This is five times longer than the provincial legislation allows,” Wilkes said.

He is calling for “a fundamental change” in the way building is regulated and approved.

“We should not be gaining false confidence for the number of cranes that are currently in the sky,” he said. Without changes, “We are going to really be in the middle of the storm in three, four or five years out, where we don’t see the cranes dotting our skyline.”

In the first half of 2022, Greater Toronto Area saw “the highest-ever” investment totals in the commercial real estate market, which surpassed $19.2 billion. This is a 41 per cent increase in the same period year over year. The “record-breaking” investments were in residential land, then industrial assets.

Despite projected improvements, the report warns that Ontario has “a very narrow window of opportunity” to complete critical infrastructure projects. This is due to several factors, including a long backlog on Ontario One Call, which requires builders and develops to call before they start digging, union strikes, inflation, and the shortage of skilled workers.

Natasha Carew, a litigation partner at multinational law firm Gowling WLG in Toronto, added that disputes in the construction industry “appear to be on the rise,” particularly in the public, private, and partnership projects.

“Our anticipation is that disputes will continue to escalate over the next few years,” affecting the construction sector.

Carew said that a novel factor affecting the disputes is the war in Ukraine.

“We are starting to see claims being contemplated or prepared related to material shortages and price increases,” she said.

Of the 230 active cranes in Toronto, 126 were deployed at residential construction sites, 41 were at commercial sites, 11 were installed in hospitality building sites and four were located at educational institutions.

In Calgary, the only other Canadian city in the index, there were 21 tower cranes, 12 of them for residential projects.

‘Anti-Woke’ Superhero Film Gets Cancelled After Losing All Its Fans’ Donations

Far-right figure “Vox Day” was allegedly hoodwinked by a self-proclaimed crypto millionaire, and the fans who fundraised the film may never see their money.

By Kyle Barr
Today 


Far-right writers have seen their hopes for an “Anti-woke” superhero go up in flames.

Superhero fans on the far-right political spectrum have one less movie to get excited about, putting their options for hateful heroes to—well—none. As first reported by The Daily Beast, a movie that was set to give us a big-screen rendition of an “anti-woke superhero” is shuttered, and the thousands of dollars fans invested in the project likely won’t be coming back to them, according to a video sent to fans and posts on the creator’s blog.

The film, called Rebel’s Run, was headed by exemplar of right-wing harassment campaigns Theodore Beale, who goes by “Vox Day” online. The movie was meant to be based on a comic series which is published under Beale’s own Arkhaven comics brand, and the movie featured one of the characters who wore a Confederate battle flag in the same style as DC’s Wonder Woman. Though the trailer for the movie is no longer available, The Daily Beast described the action as the main character “Rebel” fighting off a global police force meant to hunt down conservative voices.

The campaign started in 2019, claiming around $941,000 in funds through their own campaign hosted on their film company’s page.

Beale reportedly told his fans “I wouldn’t count on us getting that money back.” Gizmodo reached out to Beale for comment but we did not immediately hear back. Beale mentioned in the video that his movie was conned by a separate party, even alleging the scheme was meant to disrupt his endeavor and “break our community.”

In an Oct. 13 post on Beale’s blog, the right-wing figurehead mentioned that there is “legitimate possibility” that the security deposit would be returned, but they won’t see any possible funds until the person who allegedly scammed them is sentenced.


I would rather not link to Vox Day’s blog, so here’s a screenshot of his statement.Screenshot: Gizmodo

That measly $1 million raised from Beale’s fans couldn’t produce a film to rival Marvel movie juggernauts. For more funds, he reportedly turned to Ohana Capital Financial, a Utah-based company that describes itself as a private investment firm, according to The Daily Beast. The firm was headed by James Wolfgramm, but according to a federal indictment filed Sept. 21 in Utah District Court, Ohana was just one of many firms operated by the man who also operated under aliases like Smisi Niu and James Vaka Niu, including bitcoin mining.

Wolfgramm, or whatever his real name is, allegedly worked to defraud companies by claiming he was a multimillionaire who made his money in crypto. He went as far as to post pictures of expensive sports cars he didn’t actually own, according to the indictment. Among many, many charges of fraud, prosecutors said Wolfgramm formed OCF out of thin air, accepted deposits from customers and used those funds to pay other business interests.

But most important for Beale and his production company Viral Films Media, prosecutors said the company called “VFM” sought funding to produce a movie. The $1 million handed over to Ohana was supposed to be held in escrow, meaning held until certain conditions are met, by Wolfgramm and his company so they could secure a $4 million loan. Prosecutors said Wolfgramm lied to Beale and his compatriots, and instead wired those funds to a Chinese manufacturer for PPE equipment that it failed to buy for another client.

Wolfgramm faces four counts of wire fraud regarding his dealings with Viral Films Media and other alleged scams. Gizmodo reached out to Wolfgramm’s attorney, who is listed as Hutch Fale of the Utah-based Avery Bursdal & Fale, but we did not immediately hear back.
Who Else Was Involved in the Rebel’s Run Trainwreck?

Beale is a longtime right-wing blogger who promotes his own role in the misogynistic GamerGate harassment campaign. He was also at the head of the Rabid Puppies campaign attempt to usurp the SciFi Hugo Award with a host of right-wing fiction and innocuous, sexually charged e-books (which eventually blew up in his face spectacularly). Beale has been called “the most despised man in science fiction.” He reportedly called the lauded and award-winning SciFi-Fantasy author N.K. Jemisin, who is Black, an “ignorant half-savage.” These comments helped him get expelled from the Science Fiction Writers Association.

Scooter Downey was listed as the film’s director. Downey had been previously signed on to write the script for Tucker Carlson’s right-wing conspiracy extravaganza documentary series on the Jan. 6 insurrection called Patriot Purge, and was also set to direct Rebel’s Run. His IMDB page lists Tucker Carlson Originals as part of his editorial filmography, which could include the utterly insane series End of Men, and he’s promoted that series on his Twitter account. Carlson recently caught some flak for platforming and endorsing men who tan their testicles, thinking that it aids testosterone production. Here’s a hint, it doesn’t.

But of course the right-wing mindset and conspiracies run deeper than that. Downey retweeted conspiracist accounts mentioning a “health crisis” caused by “endocrine disrupting pollutants, fake food, and lack of exercise.”

The other big name attached to the film was Chuck Dixon, a well-known comics writer who has written for Marvel’s Punisher series as well as DC’s Batman through the 1990s and early 2000s. Since 2010 he has dived headlong into the alt-right conspiracist sphere and started writing for Beale’s Arkhaven brand including the Alt-Hero series. That comic even includes a “Q” storyline, with the tagline “Where we go one,” which is a common phrase for the QAnon conspiracy that believes satanic Democrats are involved in a ring of cannabalistic pedophiles.

Global Database Provides a Quantitative Snapshot of the Human Impact on the Planet

By CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY OCTOBER 15, 2022

Caltech researchers have developed the Human Impacts Database. It contains global data on how humans have impacted the planet. Credit: Caltech

If you’re in a major city nearly anywhere in the world, it is likely quite easy to grab a cheap hamburger from a nearby fast-food restaurant. But what you may not realize is that the meat in that inexpensive burger can actually illustrate a grand narrative about how humans have shaped the planet. From the land used to raise cattle for beef consumption, to the water used to feed those cattle, to the fuel used to transport the beef all over the world, the human progress that enables us to easily buy a burger—and, for that matter, hop on a plane, charge our phones, and take part in the multitude of activities that make up our everyday experiences—has changed the biosphere.

Now, California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers have developed a database containing global data on how humans have impacted the planet. The Human Impacts Database is designed to be accessible to scientists, policymakers, and everyday citizens, and provides information ranging from global plastic production (400 billion kilograms per year), to the number of cattle on Earth (about 1.6 billion), to global annual mean sea level rise (approximately 3.4 millimeters per year). The data are broken into five main categories: water, energy, flora and fauna, atmospheric and biogeochemical cycles, and land. These also include 20 subcategories. Where available, the database includes time series to help illustrate how these numbers have changed through the years.

An infographic illustrating various numerical values relevant to the human impacts on the environment. Click the magnifying glass icon in the lower right to zoom. Credit: G. Chure

The project was conducted in the laboratory of Rob Phillips, Fred and Nancy Morris Professor of Biophysics, Biology, and Physics; and led by former graduate students Griffin Chure (PhD ’20) and Rachel Banks (PhD ’22). A paper describing the research was recently published in the journal Patterns.

The team hopes that by having access to simple numbers about human impacts, citizens and scientists alike can develop data-based intuition about the way the world works and make more informed decisions.

Griffin Chure (PhD ’20) says about the Human Impacts Database: “From a personal standpoint, this project has completely changed my life. It’s changed the direction of my science. I’m confident that I’m going to spend the rest of my scientific career focusing on how humans are changing biology.” Credit: Caltech

“For example, a friend texted me asking how to compare the impact of dairy cattle versus beef cattle,” Chure says. “We can use our database to figure out that, in terms of land requirement, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use, beef cattle are more impactful by a factor of five or more on a per-calorie basis. We really hope that this database is useful for both ordinary citizens trying to make decisions and for people thinking about policy. I view being literate with numbers as a prerequisite for being informed, whether you’re a citizen or a scientist.”

The project takes a planet-wide look at human impacts rather than sorting by country or region.

“For the most part, we provide global values,” Banks explains. “We also draw data from all sorts of different resources: scientific papers, governmental and intergovernmental reports, and industry reports in some cases. We’ve made an effort to see how well these reports align. If we have multiple sources, we report more than one value for a number in order to give us a better sense of the certainty on the value.”

There is a long tradition in the sciences of building databases that contain key quantities in physics and chemistry. Inspired by this work, in 2009, Phillips and collaborator Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel developed the website BioNumbers, a publicly available site where researchers can find quantitative data on various facets of biology taken from scientific literature, such as the number of proteins involved in a particular biochemical process. The Human Impacts Database brings those same motivations to studying the many ways in which humans interact with land, oceans, and atmosphere.

Rachel Banks (PhD ’22) says of the Human Impacts Database project: “I was really inspired by it. I had never heard people talk about human impacts in this way, and it’s something that I had been curious about for a long time — so the next day I jumped on the project.” Credit: Caltech

During his PhD work, Chure frequently referred to BioNumbers, but realized it would be useful to have a database that focused specifically on quantifying how human activity impacts planetary-scale processes. He began to develop the Human Impact Database during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and the project had a bigger impact upon him than he expected.

“From a personal standpoint, this project has completely changed my life. It’s changed the direction of my science,” Chure says. “I’m confident that I’m going to spend the rest of my scientific career focusing on how humans are changing biology. That may range from considering the huge amounts of nitrogen and phosphorusthat we dump into coastal watersheds and how that changes the microbial composition of these ecosystems, to how we artificially evolve chickens to have their meat grow faster than their bones can support, for example. From a personal standpoint, this has really refocused what I care about, and what I think that I can do to be impactful.”

The team emphasizes that the database is not comprehensive or exhaustive; they plan to continually update the numbers as new data comes out.

“In my view, the root to understanding is numeracy: once you have the numbers, it becomes clear what the problems are, which things are significant, and which things are less so,” Phillips says. “Charles Darwin once remarked that numeracy gives one a ‘sixth sense.’ The Human Impacts Database is a first step toward providing a coherent invitation to that sixth sense in the context of the great human experiment.”

The project was funded in part by the Resnick Sustainability Institute at Caltech. “Projects like the Human Impacts Database are a unique resource that can help experts and the general public alike to put into clearer perspective the various ways people are affecting the planet,” says Neil Fromer, Executive Director of Programs at the RSI. “Supporting the development of this tool, alongside the other incredible research the Resnick Sustainability Institute supports on campus, is key to fulfilling our mission to educate and inform people about their impact on the world, as well as provide solutions to the problems these impacts are causing.”

Reference: “Anthroponumbers.org: A Quantitative Database Of Human Impacts on Planet Earth” by Griffin Chure, Rachel A. Banks, Avi I. Flamholz, Nicholas S. Sarai, Mason Kamb, Ignacio Lopez-Gomez, Yinon Bar-On, Ron Milo and Rob Phillips, 3 August 2022, Patterns.
DOI: 10.1016/j.patter.2022.100552

Chure and Banks are the study’s lead authors. In addition to Phillips, additional Caltech coauthors are postdoctoral scholar Avi Flamholz, and graduate students Nicholas Sarai and Ignacio Lopez-Gomez. Other co-authors are Mason Kamb of the Chan-Zuckerberg BioHub, and Yinon Bar-On and Ron Milo of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel. Funding was provided by the Resnick Sustainability Institute at Caltech and the Schwartz-Reisman Collaborative Science Program at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

Space Sustainability: NASA Funds Projects to Study Orbital Debris

By NASA OCTOBER 15, 2022

Simulation of orbital debris around Earth demonstrating the object population in the geosynchronous region. Credit: NASA ODPO

NASA is sponsoring research proposals from three university-based teams over the course of the next year to examine the economic, social, and regulatory concerns related to space sustainability as part of its efforts to address orbital debris.

Human-made objects orbiting Earth that no longer serve a purpose are considered orbital debris. Such “space junk” includes mission-related and fragmentation debris, abandoned rocket stages, and nonfunctional spacecraft.

The threat of orbital debris is taken seriously by NASA as these objects can endanger spacecraft and jeopardize access to space. Furthermore, it can impede the development of a low-Earth orbit economy, including commercial participation. These new awards will fund research that supports NASA’s commitment to addressing the problem.

“Orbital debris is one of the great challenges of our era,” said Bhavya Lal. She is associate administrator for the Office of Technology, Policy, and Strategy (OTPS) at NASA Headquarters in Washington. “Maintaining our ability to use space is critical to our economy, our national security, and our nation’s science and technology enterprise. These awards will fund research to help us understand the dynamics of the orbital environment and show how we can develop policies to limit debris creation and mitigate the impact of existing debris.”

A panel of experts evaluated and selected the following three proposals:

• “Communication and Space Debris: Connecting with Public Knowledges and Identities,” submitted by Patrice Kohl, Sergio Alvarez, and Philip Metzger of the University of Central Florida.
• “An Integrated Assessment Model for Satellite Constellations and Orbital Debris,” submitted by Akhil Rao of Middlebury College, Daniel Kaffine of the University of Colorado-Boulder, and Brian Weeden of the Secure World Foundation.
• “Adaptive Space Governance and Decision-Support using Source-Sink Evolutionary Environmental Models,” submitted by Richard Linares and Danielle Wood of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Moriba Jah of the University of Texas-Austin; Privateer Space of Maui, Hawaii, and The Aerospace Corporation of El Segundo, California, will support verification and validation of the project’s modeling tool.

NASA’s OTPS will make the teams’ results publicly available on the agency’s website. Selected teams also can work with the international Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development as part of an international call for research proposals focused on orbital debris and space sustainability.

New Discovery Indicates an Alternative Gravity Theory

By UNIVERSITY OF BONN OCTOBER 16, 2022

The dwarf galaxy NGC1427A flies through the Fornax galaxy cluster and undergoes disturbances that would not be possible if this galaxy were surrounded by a heavy and extended dark matter halo, as required by standard cosmology. Credit: ESO

Disturbances in the dwarf galaxies of one of Earth’s closest galaxy clusters point to a different gravity theory.

Dwarf galaxies are small, faint galaxies that are often found in or close to bigger galaxies or galaxy clusters. As a result, they could be impacted by their larger companions’ gravitational effects.

“We introduce an innovative way of testing the standard model based on how much dwarf galaxies are disturbed by gravitational tides’ from nearby larger galaxies,” said Elena Asencio, a Ph.D. student at the University of Bonn and the lead author of the story.

Tides occur when gravity from one body pulls on various areas of another body differently. These are comparable to tides on Earth, which form when the moon exerts a stronger pull on the side of the Earth that faces the moon.

The Fornax Cluster is home to a rich population of dwarf galaxies. Recent observations suggest that several of these dwarfs seem distorted as if the cluster environment had perturbed them. “Such perturbations in the Fornax dwarfs are not expected according to the Standard Model,” said Pavel Kroupa, Professor at the University of Bonn and Charles University in Prague. “This is because, according to the standard model, the dark matter halos of these dwarfs should partly shield them from tides raised by the cluster.”

The scientists examined the expected amount of disturbance of the dwarfs, which is determined by their internal properties and distance from the gravitationally powerful cluster center. Large galaxies with low stellar masses, as well as galaxies near the cluster center, are more easily perturbed or destroyed. They matched the findings to the amount of disturbance shown in photos taken by the European Southern Observatory’s VLT Survey Telescope.

“The comparison showed that, if one wants to explain the observations in the standard model” – said Elena Asencio – “the Fornax dwarfs should already be destroyed by gravity from the cluster center even when the tides it raises on a dwarf are sixty-four times weaker than the dwarf’s own self-gravity.” Not only is this counter-intuitive, she said, it also contradicts previous studies, which found that the external force needed to disturb a dwarf galaxy is about the same as the dwarf’s self-gravity.

Contradiction to the standard model

From this, the authors concluded that, in the standard model, it is not possible to explain the observed morphologies of the Fornax dwarfs in a self-consistent way. They repeated the analysis using Milgromian dynamics (MOND). Instead of assuming dark matter halos surrounding galaxies, the MOND theory proposes a correction to Newtonian dynamics by which gravity experiences a boost in the regime of low accelerations.

“We were not sure that the dwarf galaxies would be able to survive the extreme environment of a galaxy cluster in MOND, due to the absence of protective dark matter halos in this model – admitted Dr. Indranil Banik from the University of St. Andrews – “but our results show a remarkable agreement between observations and the MOND expectations for the level of disturbance of the Fornax dwarfs.”

“It is exciting to see that the data we obtained with the VLT survey telescope allowed such a thorough test of cosmological models,” said Aku Venhola from the University of Oulu (Finland) and Steffen Mieske from the European Southern Observatory, co-authors of the study.

This is not the first time that a study testing the effect of dark matter on the dynamics and evolution of galaxies concluded that observations are better explained when they are not surrounded by dark matter. “The number of publications showing incompatibilities between observations and the dark matter paradigm just keeps increasing every year. It is time to start investing more resources into more promising theories,” said Pavel Kroupa, a member of the Transdisciplinary Research Areas “Modelling” and “Matter” at the University of Bonn.

Dr. Hongsheng Zhao from the University of St. Andrews added: “Our results have major implications for fundamental physics. We expect to find more disturbed dwarfs in other clusters, a prediction which other teams should verify.”

Reference: “The distribution and morphologies of Fornax Cluster dwarf galaxies suggest they lack dark matter” by Elena Asencio, Indranil Banik, Steffen Mieske, Aku Venhola, Pavel Kroupa and Hongsheng Zhao, 25 June 2022, Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stac1765

Massive Space Structure May Have Been
Left by Galactic ‘Intruder,’ Astronomers Say


The gigantic structure of gas in the galaxy group known as Stephan's Quintet may have had a violent origin, according to a new study.

By Becky Ferreira

October 19, 2022, 

IMAGE: NASA / HANDOUT VIA GETTY IMAGES

ABSTRACT breaks down mind-bending scientific research, future tech, new discoveries, and major breakthroughs.

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Scientists have discovered an unexplained structure made of hydrogen gas that stretches for nearly two million light years near a famous group of interacting galaxies, according to a new study. 

The strange gas trail may have been formed by an “intruder” galaxy that collided with this galactic group, known as Stephan’s Quintet, about a billion years ago, but it will take more observations to understand the mystery of its formation.

Stephan’s Quintet is a spectacular group of five galaxies located about 300 million light years from Earth with a rich observational history. Named after Édouard Stephan, the astronomer who discovered it in 1877, the quintet was the first compact galaxy group ever spotted, and has since been imaged by countless observatories, including NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, which is the most powerful observatory ever launched.

Now, scientists led by Cong Xu, a researcher at the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing, have studied Stephan’s Quintet with the biggest single-dish telescope on Earth: China’s Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST). FAST was able to peer 100 times deeper into the galaxy group than past observations, revealing the never-before-seen gas structure that appears to be associated with the quintet, according to a study published on Wednesday in Nature. 

Stephan’s Quintet “is unique among compact groups of galaxies,” said Xu and his colleagues in the study. “Observations have previously shown that interactions between multiple members, including a high-speed intruder galaxy currently colliding into the intragroup medium, have probably generated tidal debris.” 

“The details and timing of the interactions and collisions remain poorly understood because of their multiple nature,” the team continued. However, the researchers added that diffuse structures made of atomic hydrogen gas can reveal clues about the dynamic history of galaxy groups.

“Atomic hydrogen is the least bound component of galaxies and is therefore the easiest (and hence first) to be stripped off and spread around during interactions,” the team said. “Thus, the distribution of the very diffuse atomic hydrogen and its velocity field can provide new information about the earliest interactions.” 

In other words, the billion-year backstory of Stephan’s Quintet is written in these diffuse gas structures that are starting to come into focus, thanks to next-generation observatories such as FAST. While some diffuse gas structures have been seen in the quintet before, the new study is the first to report the enormous curved trail of hydrogen near the galaxy group. The structure extends for nearly two million light years in FAST’s observations and it may be even larger, as it literally runs out of the frame.

Xu and his colleagues speculate that the feature could be the fallout of ancient interactions that occurred when fast-moving galaxies collided with Stephan’s Quintet. One possible culprit is a galaxy called NGC 7320a, which is traveling at a breakneck pace of 6,702 kilometers per second.

“A hypothetical scenario for the formation of the diffuse feature is that NGC 7320a…passed through Stephan’s Quintet approximately 1.5 billion years ago…and pulled out from one of the core member galaxies of Stephan’s Quintet a tidal tail, which developed into the diffuse feature we see now,” the team said in the study. 

“Another possibility is that…the diffuse feature could be the product of a high-speed head-on collision between another old intruder and one of the core members of Stephan’s Quintet,” the researchers added, noting that a galaxy called Anon 4 could be this ancient intruder. “In this scenario, the collision triggers an expanding density wave that pushes gas in an extended [atomic hydrogen] disk of the target galaxy outwards to form a very large ring, of which the diffuse feature is the high-density part.”

However, these proposed origin stories for the structure raise puzzling new questions. Current models suggest that gas structures should dissipate within 500 million years due to the harsh ultraviolet radiation that exists in the intergalactic medium. With that in mind, it’s unclear how this particular feature has survived on a billion-year timescale, assuming that it was formed by ancient interactions within Stephan’s Quintet.

“Our observations require a rethinking of properties of gas in outer parts of galaxy groups and demand complex modeling of different phases of the intragroup medium in simulations of group formation,” the team said. “These questions can only be answered by more sophisticated models that are built upon the existing simulations for the formation and evolution of Stephan’s Quintet.”

NASA’s NEOWISE Space Telescope Takes 12-Year Time-Lapse Movie of Entire Sky

By JET PROPULSION LABORATORY OCTOBER 19, 2022

This mosaic shows the entire sky imaged by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). Infrared light refers to wavelengths that are longer than those visible to the human eye. Many cosmic objects radiate infrared, including gas and dust clouds where stars form, and brown dwarfs. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCL

Pictures of the sky can reveal the grandeur of the cosmos, but movies can bring them to life. Movies from NASA’s NEOWISE space telescope are unveiling motion and change across the sky.

NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE, spacecraft completes one trip halfway around the Sun every six months, taking images in all directions. Once stitched together, those images form an “all-sky” map showing the location and brightness of hundreds of millions of objects. Using 18 all-sky maps produced by the spacecraft (with the 19th and 20th to be released in March 2023), astronomers have constructed what is essentially a time-lapse movie of the sky, revealing changes that span a decade

Launched in December 2009 as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, the space telescope was originally developed to survey the sky in infrared, detecting asteroids, stars, and some of the faintest galaxies in space. It did so successfully until completing its primary mission in February 2011. In December 2013, observations resumed when the telescope was taken out of hibernation and re-purposed for the NEOWISE project as an instrument to study near-Earth objects, or NEOs, as well as more distant asteroids and comets.

Each all-sky map is a tremendously valuable resource for astronomers by itself. However, when viewed in sequence as a time-lapse, they serve as an even more powerful tool for attempting to unlock the secrets of the universe. Comparing the maps can reveal distant objects that have changed position or brightness over time. This is known as time-domain astronomy.

“If you go outside and look at the night sky, it might seem like nothing ever changes, but that’s not the case,” said Amy Mainzer, principal investigator for NEOWISE at the University of Arizona in Tucson. “Stars are flaring and exploding. Asteroids are whizzing by. Black holes are tearing stars apart. The universe is a really busy, active place.”

NEOWISE was originally a data processing project to retrieve asteroid detections and characteristics from WISE – an observatory launched in 2009 and tasked with scanning the entire sky to find and study objects outside our solar system. Cryogenically cooled detectors in the spacecraft were sensitive to infrared light.

New time-lapse movies from NASA’s NEOWISE mission give astronomers the opportunity to see objects, like stars and black holes, as they move and change over time. The videos include previously hidden brown dwarfs, a feeding black hole, a dying star, a star-forming region, and a brightening star. They combine more than 10 years of NEOWISE observations and 18 all-sky images, enabling a long-term analysis and a deeper understanding of the universe. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech; WISE-NEOWISE movies compiled by Dan Caselden

Infrared light is not visible to the human eye. It is radiated by a plethora of cosmic objects, including cool, nearby stars and some of the most luminous galaxies in the universe. The WISE mission ended in 2011 after the onboard coolant – needed for some infrared observations – ran out, but the spacecraft and some of its infrared detectors were still functional. So in 2013, NASA repurposed it to track asteroids and other near-Earth objects, or NEOs. Both the mission and the spacecraft received a new name: NEOWISE.

Growing Wiser

Despite the mission shift, the infrared telescope has continued to scan the sky every six months. Astronomers have continued to use the data to study objects outside of our solar system.

For example, in 2020, researchers released the second iteration of a project called CatWISE: a catalog of objects from 12 NEOWISE all-sky maps. Astronomers use the catalog to study brown dwarfs, a population of objects found throughout the galaxy and lurking in the darkness close to our Sun. Although brown dwarfs form like stars, they don’t accumulate enough mass to kick-start fusion, the process that causes stars to shine.

This artist’s concept shows the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, spacecraft, in its orbit around Earth. In its NEOWISE mission it finds and characterizes asteroids. Credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Because of their close proximity to Earth, nearby brown dwarfs appear to move faster across the sky compared to more distant stars that are moving at the same speed. Therefore, one way to identify brown dwarfs amid the billions of objects in the catalog is to look for objects that move relatively quickly. A complementary project to CatWISE called Backyard Worlds: Planet 9 invites citizen scientists to sift through NEOWISE data for moving objects that computer searches might have missed.

With the original two WISE all-sky maps, astronomers discovered about 200 brown dwarfs within just 65 light-years of our Sun. Additional maps subsequently revealed another 60 and doubled the number of known Y-dwarfs, the coldest brown dwarfs. Compared to warmer brown dwarfs, Y-dwarfs may have a stranger story to tell in terms of how they formed and when. These discoveries help illuminate the menagerie of objects in our solar neighborhood. A more complete count of brown dwarfs close to the Sun also informs scientists about how efficient star formation is in our galaxy and how early it began.

Watching the sky change over more than a decade has also contributed to studies of how stars form. NEOWISE can gaze into the dusty blankets swaddling protostars, or balls of hot gas that are well on their way to becoming stars. Over the course of years, protostars flicker and flare as they accumulate more mass from the dust clouds that surround them. Scientists are conducting long-term monitoring of almost 1,000 protostars with NEOWISE to gain insights into the early stages of star formation.

Our understanding of black holes. has also improved thanks to data from NEOWISE. Millions of supermassive black holes were discovered at the centers of distant galaxies in the original WISE survey. In a recent study, astronomers used NEOWISE data and a technique called echo mapping to measure the size of disks of hot, glowing gas surrounding distant black holes, which are too small and too distant for any telescope to resolve.

“We never anticipated that the spacecraft would be operating this long, and I don’t think we could have anticipated the science we’d be able to do with this much data,” said Peter Eisenhardt, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and WISE project scientist.

More About the Mission

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, manages and operates the NEOWISE mission for NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. The principal investigator, Amy Mainzer, is at the University of Arizona. The Space Dynamics Laboratory in Logan, Utah, built the science instrument. Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp. of Boulder, Colorado, built the spacecraft. Science data processing takes place at IPAC at Caltech in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

JPL managed and operated WISE for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate. Edward Wright at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) was the principal investigator. The mission was selected competitively under NASA’s Explorers Program managed by the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.