NASA is set to launch its latest multi-billion-dollar telescope Sunday morning, as scientists gather at Florida\u2019s Space Coast and await liftoff with bated breath.<\/p>\n
After riding atop a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope promises to vastly expand our knowledge of planets beyond our solar system and advance the search for elusive \u201cEarth twins.\u201d The observatory will also help scientists better understand the cosmic tug-of-war between invisible \u201cdark matter\u201d and \u201cdark energy\u201d \u2014 a contest whose outcome could either expand or collapse the universe.<\/p>\n
Massive teams of engineers and scientists \u2014 including personnel from Caltech and NASA\u2019s Jet Propulsion Laboratory \u2014 have worked for over a decade to develop the $4.3-billion telescope. As a member of NASA\u2019s class of \u201cflagship\u201d astrophysics missions, its acclaimed colleagues include the Hubble and the James Webb space telescopes.<\/p>\n
Roman, named after the woman at NASA who championed the Hubble telescope, will run explorational laps around the 36-year-old observatory. It will view the heavens in the same crisp detail as Hubble, but can survey an area of sky in one year that would take Hubble 1,000 years. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis truly takes a village,\u201d said Vanessa Bailey, JPL instrument scientist for the coronagraph sensor that will aid in the search for other worlds. \u201cI grew up in rural South Dakota, and the closest town to me had about 2,000 people. There have been more than 2,000 people who have contributed in some way just to the coronograph instrument on Roman \u2014 not even Roman as a whole.\u201d<\/p>\n
In a field where scientists need reams of information to answer their most burning questions, \u201cRoman gives us this amazing, unprecedented, cutting-edge data \u2014 and a huge amount of it,\u201d said Dida Markovic, a JPL research scientist. Markovic is a deputy principal investigator for one of the teams tasked with analyzing the barrage of data (enough to fill up the storage on about 40,000 laptops over Roman\u2019s five-year mission).<\/p>\n
The search for Earth twins<\/p>\n
Since the 1990s, scientists have cataloged more than 6,300 worlds orbiting stars other than our sun. Roman aims to find 100,000 more of these exoplanets.<\/p>\n
The vast majority of discovered exoplanets were found not by taking a picture of the planet, but by sensing it indirectly \u2014 how its orbit causes its star to wobble, how it dims the star when it passes in front or how its gravity warps the light of a different star in the background.<\/p>\n
These methods are quite good at finding gigantic planets and planets that orbit incredibly close to their host stars \u2014 in other words, planets nothing like Earth. <\/p>\n
Roman will not only use these methods, but also try to observe some planets directly, measuring light that traveled all the way from the planet\u2019s atmosphere.<\/p>\n
The trouble is, Earth-like planets can be more than a billion times dimmer than their host star. That\u2019s harder than trying to spot a firefly right next to someone flashing their high-beams at you.<\/p>\n
The James Webb Space Telescope can see planets about 100,000 times dimmer than their star. It does this by covering the host star from its view with masks, called coronagraphs, to better see the planet (like covering up the blinding headlights with your hand).<\/p>\n
With such a large gap between what\u2019s needed to find an \u201cEarth twin\u201d and what current telescopes can achieve, \u201cno matter how bright your engineering team is, you\u2019re not going to do that in one generation of telescopes,\u201d said Bailey, the Roman coronagraph instrument scientist. \u201cSo, enter the Roman coronagraph.\u201d<\/p>\n
Roman can focus starlight into an easy-to-cover pinprick with tremendous precision. More than 3,200 pistons distort two flexible mirrors with near atomic-scale precision to account for blemishes.<\/p>\n
Once in focus, Roman will patiently wait. With planets this dim, the telescope may receive only a single particle of light once every minute. (Even when you look at the faintest stars in the night sky, your eyeballs are receiving a couple hundred photon particles from the star every second.)<\/p>\n
If Roman succeeds, it will put scientists one step closer to a future Habitable Worlds Observatory that searches for Earth twins \u2014 and perhaps one step closer to finding our cosmic neighbors.<\/p>\n
The universe\u2019s dark tug-of-war<\/p>\n
For decades, scientists have struggled to understand the invisible game of tug-of-war that dominates our universe. <\/p>\n
So-called \u201cdark matter\u201d clumps around galaxies and snakes throughout space in long tendrils. Even though light can pass through it, making it invisible, it exerts a massive gravitational force that works to collapse the universe in on itself.<\/p>\n
Meanwhile, \u201cdark energy\u201d seems to permeate every square inch of space, pushing outward and accelerating the universe\u2019s expansion.<\/p>\n
In this cosmic battle, dark energy appears to be winning \u2014 expanding our universe over trillions of years until everything thins and smooths out into almost nothingness. <\/p>\n
To measure the strength of dark energy, scientists look at how fast the universe is expanding and work backward. To locate dark matter, scientists measure how its gravity bends the light from galaxies. <\/p>\n
Astrophysicists have several theories for what dark matter could be. Some say its unknown heavy and slow-moving particles. Others think the unknown particles are lighter and faster. Others say its ancient black holes lurking throughout space.<\/p>\n
While all these theories successfully describe the large-scale clumping scientists can measure, they disagree over how dark matter should clump on smaller scales. Roman will help scientists measure that small clumping for the first time.<\/p>\n
To do it, Markovic\u2019s team will look at how dark matter bends the light of hundreds of millions of galaxies to create maps of its structure.<\/p>\n
As for dark energy, scientists have long assumed its strength to be constant. But recent, more precise measurements of dark energy\u2019s strength hint that it might actually be decreasing.<\/p>\n
Roman\u2019s expansive surveys will help scientists look at dark energy\u2019s evolution with even more clarity, hopefully settling whether or not it\u2019s constant. <\/p>\n
If in fact dark energy is growing weaker, it could allow dark matter to take the edge in the tug-of-war and send the universe crashing in on itself (way, way into the future). It could also have profound consequences for Einstein\u2019s theory of general relativity, which has been proven correct time and time again in the century-plus since he published it.<\/p>\n
\u201cRelativity seems pretty solid. We haven\u2019t seen any deviations from that,\u201d said Katie Mack, Hawking chair in cosmology and science communication at the Perimeter Institute. \u201cSo, if that\u2019s being broken, then that\u2019s a much bigger deal and a much more confusing and complicated problem.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NASA is set to launch its latest multi-billion-dollar telescope Sunday morning, as scientists gather at Florida\u2019s Space Coast…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":583335,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[287180,402,2598,287179,5434,15110,6804,3323,111,139,69,19794,88821,147,388,137138,2737,3929,23272],"class_list":["post-583334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-cosmic-tug-of-war","tag-dark-energy","tag-dark-matter","tag-earth-twin","tag-galaxy","tag-hubble","tag-light","tag-nasa","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-planet","tag-roman","tag-science","tag-scientist","tag-space-coast","tag-star","tag-telescope","tag-universe"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=583334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/583334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/583335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=583334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=583334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=583334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}