Imagine the light of 1 billion galaxies. Dark matter that could be causing our universe to expand more rapidly. Exoplanets that are believed to harbor life beyond Earth.
All this will be explored by the new Roman space telescope, which will be launched by NASA in September and will offer not only a new atlas of the universe, but a much broader one, since it has a field of view at least a hundred times larger than that of Hubble.
It will also do it much faster.
It will study the sky 1,000 times faster than the Hubble telescope, while retaining similar sensitivity and resolution in the infrared.
This will help unravel some of the mysteries of the cosmos, such as the nature of dark energy and dark matter, whose origin is unknown, but it is believed that they make up 95% of the universe.
The Roman will also explore how planets, stars and galaxies form and develop over time, as well as exoplanets and infrared astrophysics, and will reveal our universe in a way that has never been possible before.
To do this, it has a critical mirror of 2.4 meters in diameter, the same size as Hubble’s, as well as two powerful tools: a wide-field instrument and a chronograph.
NASA has worked on its development for more than a decade, its cost has exceeded US$4 billion and it has managed to get ahead of the planned schedule, since it will be launched by SpaceX in early September and not in 2027, as originally predicted.
The new telescope has been named in honor of Nancy Grace Roman, known as the “mother of Hubble”, a pioneer in modern space astronomy and the first head of NASA’s Astronomy Department.
What will Roman study?
The powerful new telescope will help scientists better understand three important and fascinating fields of study: dark energy, dark matter and exoplanets.
One of the big questions in astronomy today is why the expansion of the universe is accelerating.
The universe as we know it originated in the Substantial Bang – according to the most accepted theories among scientists – which took place 13.8 billion years ago, lasted just a fraction of a second and gave rise to a rapid expansion of the cosmos.
But after that first “explosion,” gravity began to slow down the universe until 9 billion years later its expansion began to accelerate again, driven by an unknown force that has been dubbed dark energy.
Scientists do not know exactly what it is, although it does exist and makes up between 68.3% and 70% of the cosmos.
Another approximate 27% of the universe is made up of what is known as dark matter, which scientists describe as the invisible glue that holds the cosmos together and which they have been trying to unravel for almost a century.
This matter makes up most of the mass of galaxies and galaxy clusters, while the rest, which is neither matter nor dark energy, that is, ordinary matter – from the screen on which you read this text, the eyes that look at it, the earth under your feet or the Sun – constitutes only about 5% of the universe.
Dark matter occupies space and has mass, although it does not absorb, reflect or emit light, so it is not easy to study.
A greater understanding of the distribution of dark matter, NASA explains, will help answer big cosmic questions about how the universe is organized and how it has changed.
Roman’s potency will also help scientists expand our view of the universe. If until just a generation ago we barely knew our Voltaic System, today we know that there are thousands of more distant worlds, known as exoplanets. Among them, astronomers dream of finding habitable Earth-like planets.
The Roman will make it possible to find around 100,000 planets using different techniques, says NASA, and will lay the foundations for the future Habitable Worlds Observatory.
What instruments does the Roman have?
Ronan has a field of view at least a hundred times larger than Hubble’s, and will be able to study the sky 1,000 times faster than NASA’s legendary telescope launched in 1990.
To do this, it has a powerful 2.4 meter diameter mirror, as well as a wide field instrument and a chronograph.
With this you will be able to map how matter is structured and distributed throughout the cosmos and measure how the universe has expanded over time.
The wide-field instrument will measure light from one billion galaxies over the life of this mission, which is scheduled for five years, with a possible extension of another five.
This will be carried out with multiple observation strategies, including surveys of supernovae and galaxy clusters, as well as the preparation of three-dimensional maps of the distribution of galaxies.
Also with this instrument, Roman will carry out a survey of the microlensing effect – by which a star inside our galaxy in the foreground acts as a lens – to study more distant planets.
In this way, the new telescope will monitor 100 million stars for hundreds of days and is expected to find around 2,500 planets, with a significant number of rocky planets inside and outside the region where liquid water could exist.
The coronagraph instrument technology demonstration will generate high-contrast images and perform spectroscopy on nearby exoplanets individually.
The chronograph that the Roman telescope has will allow a demonstration of the technology used to obtain direct images of exoplanets by blocking the light of a star, which allows observing the planets, which are much fainter, notes NASA.
How Roman complements Hubble and James Webb
NASA’s new space telescope has been compared to the legendary Hubble, which was launched in 1990 and has changed our understanding of the universe. However, Roman will study the cosmos in a complementary and unique way, says the US space agency.
Its primary mirror, with which it will capture light from very distant points in the universe, is the same size as Hubble’s. The images it collects will be as sharp as those from the veteran telescope, but each of them will cover an area of the sky at least 100 times larger.
In just the first five years of observations, Roman will image an area of the sky more than 50 times larger than Hubble covered in 30 years.
While Hubble is tuned to view the universe in ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared wavelengths, Roman is tuned to view visible light and beyond, in the infrared.
The images from the new telescope will cover very large areas which, added to observatories such as the James Webb, launched in 2021, will allow astronomers to obtain the most complete view of the universe to date.
While the Roman will be able to locate rare objects in cosmic ecosystems, the Webb, which has narrower but more powerful vision, will be able to track these objects and obtain even more detailed observations.
The Roman will capture images 50 times larger than what Webb can capture. But the latter sees further back in time and with greater resolution. This is because Webb’s critical mirror is much larger: 6.5 meters compared to Roman’s 2.4 meters.
Together, “the two observatories will reveal extraordinary new information about our universe, such as primordial galaxies, black holes and planets beyond our solar system,” notes NASA.
Who was Nancy Grace Roman?
Astronomer Nancy Grace Roman is known as “the mother of the Hubble Space Telescope” for the efforts she put into getting the legendary observatory approved by the US Congress.
Born in Tennessee (USA) in 1925, she showed a great passion for astronomy from a young age.
She received her bachelor’s degree in Astronomy in 1946 and, three years later, her doctorate from the University of Chicago, where she worked for six years but ended up leaving convinced that she would never receive a full professor position because she was a woman.
Six months after NASA was formed, in 1959, Roman joined the founding team, becoming the first woman in an executive position at NASA and the first head of the Department of Astronomy. She later held various other positions at the NASA agency, including head of Astronomy and Voltaic Physics and head of Astronomy and Relativity.
For Nancy Grace Roman, Hubble’s most interesting discovery was dark energy, which the new telescope that bears her name will now help understand.
click hereto inquire more stories from BBC News Mundo.
Subscribe hereto our new e-newsletter to receive a selection of our best content of the week every Friday.
You can also follow us on YouTube, instagram, TikTok, x, Facebookand in our new whatsapp channel.
And remember that you can receive notifications in our app. Download the latest version and activate them.
- How the James Webb Space Telescope detected the galaxy closest to the origin of the universe
- Why scientists believe they are close to solving the mystery of “Planet 9” (and what is Chile’s role in this search)
- 30 years of Hubble: the “Pillars of Creation” and 4 other findings from the telescope that revolutionized what we know about our universe
