NASA teases the capabilities of its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is set to launch in May 2027, by creating a massive simulated universe that contains 33 million galaxies. This synthetic survey aims to help scientists plan the best observing strategies, test different ways to collect vast quantities of data, and explore the possibilities of tandem observations with other telescopes.
This synthetic Roman Space Telescope survey spans 20 square degrees of the sky, which is approximately 95 full moons. The actual survey will be 100 times larger, uncovering over a billion galaxies, enabling astronomers to study the structure and evolution of the universe, map dark matter, and distinguish between the leading theories that attempt to explain why the expansion of the universe is speeding up.
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Theories of cosmic structure formation make predictions for how the seed fluctuations in the early universe grow into the distribution of matter that can be seen through gravitational lensing. But the predictions are statistical in nature, so we test them by observing vast regions of the cosmos. Roman, with its wide field of view, will be optimized to efficiently survey the sky, complementing observatories such as the James Webb Space Telescope that are designed for deeper investigation of individual objects,” said Chris Hirata, a physics professor at Ohio State University in Columbus.
