NASA's latest infrared space telescope—the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE—was launched on December 14, 2009. It recently began a six-month survey of the entire sky around Earth. With its unprecedented sensitivity, WISE will map the sky in wavelengths longer than the human eye can see, revealing previously unknown asteroids, brown dwarfs, and distant, dusty galaxies.

The WISE mission has partnered with the Hayden Planetarium to visualize these newly discovered objects in the Digital Universe 3-D Atlas. In anticipation, WISE team members created a simulation of WISE's potential brown dwarf discoveries. The Digital Universe team created a video fly-through of the simulated data, which is featured in the latest Astro Bulletin below. View the entire video, called The Solar Neighborhood After WISE, on the University of California's WISE website.

To learn about recent astronomical discoveries and other news about space, visit the Science Bulletins website.

Astronomers have been puzzling over how to classify brown dwarfs since they were first discovered in 1995. So far, observations have shown that they fall somewhere between stars and planets in terms of mass, temperature, luminosity, and other properties. Two new studies lend insight into the formation of brown dwarfs and indicate that these mysterious objects are more like failed stars than planets.

To learn about other recent astronomical discoveries, visit the Science Bulletins website.