NASA releases cosmic image catalog

LOS ANGELES, March 16 (UPI) -- NASA says more than a half billion stars, galaxies and other objects are in a catalog of images captured by its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission.

"Today WISE delivers the fruit of 14 years of effort to the astronomical community," Edward L. (Ned) Wright, a UCLA professor of physics and astronomy and the mission's principal investigator, said Wednesday as NASA released an atlas and catalog of the infrared images.

The individual WISE exposures have been combined into an atlas of more than 18,000 images and a catalog listing the infrared properties of more than 560 million objects found in the images, a UCLA release said.

WISE, launched Dec. 14, 2009, mapped the entire sky in 2010 and collected more than 2.7 million images taken at four infrared wavelengths of light, capturing everything from nearby asteroids to distant galaxies.

Among the discoveries of the WISE mission were elusive failed stars, dubbed Y-dwarfs, which astronomers had been hunting for more than a decade.

Because they have been cooling since their formation, they do not shine in visible light and could not be found until WISE mapped the sky with its infrared vision, researchers said.