Mel

Nearly 100 years ago, astronomer Bernard Lyot invented the coronagraph – a device that made it possible to recreate a total solar eclipse by blocking the Sun’s light. That helped scientists study the Sun’s corona, which is the outermost part of our star’s atmosphere that’s usually hidden by bright light from its surface.

Our Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, now under construction, will test out a much more advanced version of the same thing. Roman’s Coronagraph Instrument will use special masks to block the glare from host stars but allow the light from dimmer, orbiting planets to filter through. It will also have self-flexing mirrors that will measure and subtract starlight automatically.

This glare-blocking prowess is important because planets can be billions of times dimmer than their host stars! Roman’s high-tech shades will help us take pictures of planets we wouldn’t be able to photograph using any other current telescopes.

Other observatories mainly use this planet-hunting method, called direct imaging, from the ground to photograph huge, bright planets called “super-Jupiters” in infrared light. These worlds can be dozens of times more massive than Jupiter, and they’re so young that they glow brightly thanks to heat left over from their formation. That glow makes them detectable in infrared light.

Roman will take advanced planet-imaging tech to space to get even higher-quality pictures. And while it’s known for being an infrared telescope, Roman will actually photograph planets in visible light, like our eyes can see. That means it will be able to see smaller, older, colder worlds orbiting close to their host stars. Roman could even snap the first-ever image of a planet like Jupiter orbiting a star like our Sun.

Astronomers would ultimately like to take pictures of planets like Earth as part of the search for potentially habitable worlds. Roman’s direct imaging efforts will move us a giant leap in that direction!

And direct imaging is just one component of Roman’s planet-hunting plans. The mission will also use a light-bending method called microlensing to find other worlds, including rogue planets that wander the galaxy untethered to any stars. Scientists also expect Roman to discover 100,000 planets as they cross in front of their host stars!

Find out more about the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on Twitter and Facebook, and about the person from which the mission draws its name.

the “humans are inherently evil and will seize on any opportunity to fuck each other over” trope is not only tired, boring, and cynical, it’s just…wrong. I mean, to reiterate & get the obvious point out of the way, yes, anyone who espouses this view is not to be trusted. 99% of the time the person is just telling you what they would do when given the chance. You don’t want to be friends with someone who has fantasies of becoming some Mad-Maxian water-hoarder enslaving people for food. 

but aside from that—the idea that people are horrible whenever given the chance is just…not backed up by real life. I’ve seen some shit. I was in Charlottesville on That Day and saw some really horrific sides of humanity that I have thought about almost every day since. But on the way back to our car, all of us filthy and sweaty and with low-key chemical burns from mace, some strangers saw us and asked if we needed help. They let us into their home and gave us water and food and let us shower before we drove home. They are probably part of the reason that I didn’t get hit by the car, because the time window we missed it by wasn’t a lot. 

in February, Texas had a snowstorm/freeze of historic proportions. our statewide power grid was minutes away from a failure that would have left us all without electricity for months. Temperatures got down to teens here in Austin, where houses aren’t built to handle that & most people don’t know what to do, and a lot of people died (probably way more than official counts). I can’t get into all the hows and whys re: the disaster and its scope, but it’s definitely the closest thing to an apocalypse that I’ve lived through. 

What happened during that week and the next, while some people had power and food and water and others didn’t? Did the haves leave the have-nots to die? Sure, some people cozied up in their homes and ignored the disaster, but a lot of us didn’t. My coworker (who didn’t have power himself) was running a crockpot from his truck so he could bring hot meals to people in need. I collected fallen limbs and turned them into firewood deliveries. Every local Facebook group I’m in turned into an ad-hoc mutual aid group, organizing food and water dropoffs. Strangers let other people into their homes, in the middle of a pandemic, whether to stay for days or just to shower and do laundry or eat a warm meal. My friends in other states contacted me, unprompted, to send me money so I could get more baby formula and food to give to people in need. 

I think about this a lot: 

Anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked by a student what she considered to be the first sign of civilization in a culture.

Mead said that the first sign of civilization in an ancient culture was a femur (thighbone) that had been broken and then healed. Mead explained that in the animal kingdom, if you break your leg, you die. You cannot run from danger, get to the river for a drink or hunt for food. You are meat for prowling beasts. No animal survives a broken leg long enough for the bone to heal. A broken femur that has healed is evidence that someone has taken time to stay with the one who fell, has bound up the wound, has carried the person to safety and has tended the person through recovery. Helping someone else through difficulty is where civilization starts. We are at our best when we serve others. Be civilized.

— Ira Byock, The Best Care Possible: A Physician’s Quest to Transform Care Through the End of Life (Avery, 2012)

This is who we can be, and often are. We can be civilized and kind and help each other. It’s not the path of least resistance in our current culture and societal structure, it’s not the easiest path, but it’s there. And I do think most (maybe not a vast majority, but a majority) people want to follow it, but a lot of them don’t know how and haven’t been shown yet. When you do that, when you work with mutual aid groups or help the lost child or carry the heavy groceries for the stranger that isn’t up to it, you’re showing them. You’re a guiding light to a better way for all of us to be.