NASA’s new telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, has been fully assembled at the agency’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. With the help of the telescope, scientists will conduct a High Latitude Wide Area Survey. It will be done looking away from our galaxy and will help to detect and measure “tens of thousands of cosmic voids” said to be about 20 million lightyears across.
Understanding cosmic voids and more
To understand the shapes of these voids, they will use two types of data from the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope: the positions of galaxies in the sky and their cosmological redshifts, obtained from spectroscopic observations. Cosmological redshift is the observation that, over time, the universe has been expanding due to a force called dark energy, causing galaxies to move farther apart and their light to shift to redder wavelengths. For this particular telescope, it is said to cover 2,400 square degrees of the sky, or 12,000 full moons.
That’s not all. The telescope can detect fainter or more distant objects, helping scientists understand the higher density of galaxies. According to Giulia Degni of Roma Tre University and the National Institute of Nuclear Physics, “Voids are defined by the fact that they contain so few galaxies. So, to detect voids, you have to be able to observe galaxies that are quite sparse and faint.” She added that with the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, astronomers will have a better view of the galaxies, which will also lead to a better understanding of the “dark energy that is sculpting voids.” The observatory will also be able to block starlight to see exoplanets and planet-forming disks. It aims to complete a statistical census of planetary systems in our galaxy.
The foreseeable future
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has been named after NASA’s first chief astronomer. After completing its final stages, the telescope will be shifted to its launch site at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida for launch preparations this summer. It is also slated to launch by May 2027 by a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket. Julie McEnery, Roman’s senior project scientist at NASA Goddard, said, “In the mission’s first five years, it’s expected to unveil more than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies. We stand to learn a tremendous amount of new information about the universe very rapidly after Roman launches.”
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Photo credit: The feature image used is owned by NASA and has been made available for press usage.
