{"id":185063,"date":"2025-03-12T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-03-11T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.nasa.gov\/?p=832061"},"modified":"2025-03-12T00:00:00","modified_gmt":"2025-03-11T14:00:00","slug":"team-preps-to-study-dark-energy-via-exploding-stars-with-nasas-roman","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vibewire.com.au\/?p=185063","title":{"rendered":"Team Preps to Study Dark Energy via Exploding Stars With NASA\u2019s Roman"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Supernova<\/a><\/figure>
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This video sparkles with synthetic supernovae from the OpenUniverse project, which simulates observations from NASA\u2019s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. More than a million exploding stars flare into visibility and then slowly fade away. The true brightness of each transient event has been magnified by a factor of 10,000 for visibility, and no background light has been added to the simulated images. The pattern of squares shows Roman\u2019s full field of view.<\/div>\n
Credit: NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center and M. Troxel<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The universe is ballooning outward at an ever-faster clip under the power of an unknown force dubbed dark energy. One of the major goals for NASA\u2019s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is to help astronomers gather clues to the mystery. One team is setting the stage now to help astronomers prepare for this exciting science.<\/p>\n

\u201cRoman will scan the cosmos a thousand times faster than NASA\u2019s Hubble Space Telescope can while offering Hubble-like image quality,\u201d said Rebekah Hounsell<\/a>, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland-Baltimore county working at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-principal investigator of the Supernova Cosmology Project Infrastructure Team preparing for the mission\u2019s High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey<\/a>. \u201cWe\u2019re going to have an overwhelming amount of data, and we want to make it so scientists can use it from day one.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roman will repeatedly look at wide, deep regions of the sky in near-infrared light, opening up a whole new view of the universe and revealing all sorts of things going bump in the night. That includes stars being shredded as they pass too close to a black hole, intense emissions from galaxy centers, and a variety of stellar explosions called supernovae.<\/p>\n

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This data sonification transforms a vast simulation of a cosmic survey from NASA\u2019s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into a symphony of stellar explosions. Each supernova\u2019s brightness controls its volume, while its color sets its pitch \u2013\u2013 redder, more distant supernovae correspond to deep, low tones while bluer, nearer ones correspond to higher frequencies. The sound in stereo mirrors their locations in the sky. The result sounds like celestial wind chimes, offering a way to \u201clisten\u201d to cosmic fireworks. <\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Credit: NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center, M. Troxel, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida)<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Cosmic Radar Guns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Scientists estimate around half a dozen stars explode somewhere in the observable universe every minute. On average, one of them will be a special variety called type Ia<\/a> that can help astronomers measure the universe.<\/p>\n

These explosions peak at a similar intrinsic brightness, allowing scientists to find their distances simply by measuring how bright they appear.<\/p>\n

Scientists can also study the light of these supernovae to find out how quickly they are moving away from us. By comparing how fast they\u2019re receding at different distances, scientists will trace cosmic expansion over time.<\/p>\n

Using dozens of type Ia supernovae, scientists discovered that the universe\u2019s expansion is accelerating<\/a>. Roman will find tens of thousands, including very distant ones, offering more clues about the nature of dark energy and how it may have changed throughout the history of the universe.<\/p>\n

\u201cRoman\u2019s near-infrared view will help us peer farther because more distant light is stretched, or reddened, as it travels across expanding space,\u201d said Benjamin Rose, an assistant professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, and a co-principal investigator of the infrastructure team. \u201cAnd opening a bigger window, so to speak, will help us get a better understanding of these objects as a whole,\u201d which would allow scientists to learn more about dark energy. That could include discovering new physics, or figuring out the universe\u2019s fate<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The People\u2019s Telescope<\/strong><\/p>\n

Members of the planning team have been part of the community process to seek input from scientists worldwide on how the survey should be designed and how the analysis pipeline should work. Gathering public input in this way is unusual for a space telescope, but it\u2019s essential for Roman because each large, deep observation will enable a wealth of science in addition to fulfilling the survey\u2019s main goal of probing dark energy.<\/p>\n

Rather than requiring that many individual scientists submit proposals to reserve their own slice of space telescope time, Roman\u2019s major surveys will be coordinated openly, and all the data will become public right away.<\/p>\n

\u201cInstead of a single team pursuing one science goal, everyone will be able to comb through Roman\u2019s data for a wide variety of purposes,\u201d Rose said. \u201cEveryone will get to play right away.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"A<\/a><\/figure>
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This animation shows a possible tiling pattern of part of NASA\u2019s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope\u2019s High Latitude Time-Domain Survey. The observing program, which is being designed by a community process, is expected to have two components: wide (covering 18 square degrees, a region of sky as large as about 90 full moons) and deep (covering about 5.5 square degrees, about as large as 25 full moons). This animation shows the deeper portion, which would peer back to when the universe was about 500 million years old, less than 4 percent of its current age of 13.8 billion years.<\/div>\n
Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center<\/div>\n<\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

This Is a Drill<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n

NASA plans to announce the survey design for Roman\u2019s three core surveys<\/a>, including the High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey, this spring. Then the planning team will simulate it in its entirety.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s kind of like a recipe,\u201d Hounsell said. \u201cYou put in your observing strategy \u2014 how many days, which filters \u2014 and add in \u2018spices\u2019 like uncertainties, calibration effects, and the things we don\u2019t know so well about the instrument or supernovae themselves that would affect our results. We can inject supernovae into the synthetic images and develop the tools we\u2019ll need to analyze and evaluate the data.\u201d<\/p>\n

Scientists will continue using the synthetic data even after Roman begins observing, tweaking all aspects of the simulation and correcting unknowns to see which resulting images best match real observations. Scientists can then fine-tune our understanding of the universe\u2019s underlying physics.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe assume that all supernovae are the same regardless of when they occurred in the history of the universe, but that might not be the case,\u201d Hounsell said. \u201cWe\u2019re going to look further back in time than we\u2019ve ever done with type Ia supernovae, and we\u2019re not completely sure if the physics we understand now will hold up.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are reasons to suspect they may not. The very first stars were made almost exclusively of hydrogen and helium, compared to stars today which contain several dozen elements. Those ancient stars also lived in very different environments than stars today. Galaxies were growing and merging, and stars were forming at a furious pace before things began calming down between about 8 and 10 billion years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cRoman will very dramatically add to our understanding of this cosmic era,\u201d Rose said. \u201cWe\u2019ll learn more about cosmic evolution and dark energy, and thanks to Roman\u2019s large deep view, we\u2019ll get to do much more science too with the same data. Our work will help everyone hit the ground running after Roman launches.\u201d<\/p>\n

For more information about the Roman Space Telescope visit www.nasa.gov\/roman<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech\/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems Inc. in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.<\/p>\n

By Ashley Balzer<\/strong>
NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center<\/strong><\/a>, Greenbelt, Md.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Media contact:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Claire Andreoli<\/strong>
NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-1940<\/strong><\/p>\n

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