NASA’s new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will explore thousands of supernovae across broad periods and space. The telescope is expected to bring enough data so that astronomers will finally shed some light on several cosmic deep-buried mysteries.
Roman’s mission will also offer more details of how fast the Universe is now expanding. How successful the survey will be, only time could tell.
Here is what you need to know.
The Universe’s Deep-buried Mysteries
We know that most of the cosmos is dark energy, and that’s something we don’t actually know what it is. By pinning down some possible explanations, the Roman space telescope could shed light on our understanding of the Universe. But how we’ll do it?
Roman will enable various techniques to examine dark energy. For a start, it will start surveying the sky for supernovae.
Astronomers will use the telescope to analyze the supernovae’s light to discover how fast they appear to be moving away from us. How will they do that?
First, they’ll compare how much they move across various lengths. Then, they’ll trace cosmic expansion over time.
Finally, that will offer us enough data to find out whether and how dark energy has evolved throughout the history of the Universe.
“We need extremely precise measurements and an incredibly stable instrument, which is exactly what Roman will provide,” explained Daniel Scolnic, an assistant professor of physics at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.
Other Significant Details
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is controlled by NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, joined by Caltech/ IPAC in Southern California, NASA’s JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), and Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. Of course, there will be more science teams, too, including scientists from many research institutions.
The telescope is expected to bring an avalanche of data to help scientists solve longstanding puzzles of the Universe. If successful, Roman will be the first space telescope to achieve such tasks.
