#nebulae

A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will send the observatory to its final destination a million miles from Earth. Observing from way out in space will make Roman very sensitive to infrared light — light with a longer wavelength than our eyes can see — from far across the cosmos. Pairing its crisp infrared vision with a sweeping view of space will allow astronomers to explore all kinds of cosmic topics, from dark matter and dark energy to distant worlds and solitary black holes, and conduct research that would take hundreds of years using other telescopes.

Roman is equipped with two instruments: the Wide Field Instrument and the Coronagraph Instrument technology demonstration.

The Wide Field Instrument is a 288-megapixel camera that will unveil the cosmos all the way from our solar system to near the edge of the observable universe. Using this instrument, each Roman image will capture a patch of the sky bigger than the apparent size of a full moon.

That will help the mission gather data hundreds of times faster than our Hubble Space Telescope, adding up to 20,000 terabytes (20 petabytes) over the course of its five-year primary mission. If all that data were printed as text and the pages were placed on top of each other, the stack would extend way past the Moon!

This image compares Roman’s field of view (the large outer outline) with Hubble’s (the small, square inset). Roman will capture at least 100 times more area in each image with crisp resolution that rivals Hubble’s, enabling astronomers to explore the universe in exciting new ways.

The Coronagraph will demonstrate new technologies for directly imaging planets around other stars. It will block the glare from distant stars and make it easier for scientists to see the faint light from planets in orbit around them. The Coronagraph aims to photograph worlds and dusty disks around nearby stars in visible light to help us see giant worlds that are older, colder, and in closer orbits than the hot, young super-Jupiters direct imaging has mainly revealed so far.

The gravity of intervening galaxy clusters and dark matter can lens the light from farther objects, warping their appearance as shown in this animated artist’s concept. By studying the distorted light with the Roman Space Telescope, astronomers can study elusive dark matter, which can only be measured indirectly through its gravitational effects on visible matter.

Using the Wide Field Instrument, Roman will conduct three major surveys which will account for 75% of the primary mission. The High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey will unveil more than a billion galaxies strewn across a wide swath of space and time. Astronomers will trace the evolution of the universe to probe dark matter — invisible matter detectable only by how its gravity affects things we can see — and see how galaxies and galaxy groups formed.

The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey will watch for things that go bump in the universe by observing the same region of the cosmos repeatedly. Stitching these observations together to create movies will allow scientists to study how celestial objects and phenomena change over time periods of days to years. That will help astronomers study dark energy — the mysterious cosmic pressure thought to accelerate the universe’s expansion — and could even uncover entirely new phenomena that we’ve never seen before.

A simulated image of Roman’s observations toward the center of our galaxy, spanning much less than 1 percent of the total area of Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey.

Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey will look inward to provide one of the deepest views ever of the heart of our Milky Way galaxy. Astronomers will watch hundreds of millions of stars in search of microlensing signals — gravitational boosts of a background star’s light caused by the gravity of an intervening object. While astronomers have mainly discovered star-hugging worlds, Roman’s microlensing observations can find planets in the habitable zone of their star and farther out, including worlds like every planet in our solar system except Mercury. Microlensing will also reveal rogue planets — worlds that roam the galaxy untethered to a star — and small, isolated black holes. The same dataset will reveal 100,000 worlds that transit, or pass in front of, their host stars.

This infographic previews some of the discoveries scientists anticipate from NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s five-year primary mission. Scientists expect it to see an incredible number of new objects, including stars, galaxies, black holes and planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets.

Roman will collect all of that data in less than four years! The remaining 25% of Roman’s five-year primary mission will be dedicated to other groundbreaking observations, which mostly haven’t been determined yet. With Roman’s unprecedented view of the universe, who knows what other exciting discoveries await?