Nasa on Tuesday unveiled a new telescope to scan large swaths of the universe for planets outside our solar system and probe the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.
The Roman Space Telescope is expected to discover tens of thousands of planets, possibly shedding light on how many may be out there.
“Roman will give Earth a new atlas of the universe,” Nasa Administrator Jared Isaacman told a press conference at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, where the telescope was on display.
The 12-meter-long silver-colored device with massive solar panels will be transported to Florida ahead of a launch into space aboard a SpaceX rocket, scheduled for September at the earliest.
Roman, which took more than $4 billion and more than a decade to build, is named after astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, nicknamed “Hubble’s mother” for her role in developing the landmark space telescope.
36 years after Hubble launched into space and revolutionized astronomical observations, Nasa hopes Roman will help shed light on questions that remain unresolved.
With a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble’s, the telescope will sweep across large areas of space from its position 1.5 million kilometers (930,000 miles) from Earth.
The telescope will send 11 terabytes of data a day down to Earth, said Mark Melton, a systems engineer at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
“In the first year, we will have sent down more data than Hubble will have in its entire life,” he said AFP.
The telescope’s wide-angle lens will allow Nasa to take a census of the objects that make up our universe, said Nicky Fox, associate administrator for Nasa’s Science Mission Directorate.
“Roman will discover tens of thousands of new planets outside our solar system. It will reveal billions of galaxies, thousands of supernovae and tens of thousands of stars,” she said.
This wealth of information will enable Nasa to tease out areas of interest that can then be investigated by complementary telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope.
Study the invisible
But Roman will also study the invisible – dark matter and dark energy, the origin of which remains unknown but which is believed to make up 95% of our universe.
Dark matter is thought to be the glue that holds galaxies together, while dark energy pulls them apart by causing the universe to expand faster and faster over time.
Thanks to its infrared vision, the telescope will be able to observe light emitted by celestial bodies billions of years ago, effectively looking back in time to hopefully discover more about the two phenomena.
Complementing work from Europe’s Euclid Space Telescope and the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile, Roman will investigate “how dark matter structures itself through cosmic time” and “calculate how fast galaxies are moving away from us,” said Darryl Seligman, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at Michigan State University. AFP.
These discoveries could fundamentally change our understanding of the structure of our universe, said astrophysicist Julie McEnery, who led the Roman project.
“If Roman wins a Nobel Prize at some point, it’s probably for something we haven’t even thought about or questioned yet,” Melton said.
