NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to monitor hundreds of millions of stars in the Milky Way and provide the deepest-ever views into the heart of our galaxy. This includes isolated black holes, detecting the farthest-known exoplanet, and even small icy objects on the outskirts of our solar system.
When the mission launches in May 2027, it will scan the Milky Way’s galactic center for microlensing events, which occur when an object such as a star or planet comes into near-perfect alignment with an unrelated background star from our viewpoint. Since anything with mass warps the fabric of space-time, light from the distant star bends around the nearer object as it passes close by, functioning as a natural magnifying glass of sorts. Astronomers plan on taking an image every 15 minutes around the clock for about two months and the will be repeated process six times over Roman’s five-year primary mission.
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Roman will be an incredible discovery machine, pairing a vast view of space with keen vision. Its time-domain surveys will yield a treasure trove of new information about the cosmos,” said Julie McEnery, the Roman senior project scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center.
