Falcon Heavy | Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

The universe is full of shadows whose silhouettes hint at the presence of a strange form of matter. It behaves somewhat like an ocean current, invisibly steering everything within it. Scientists have been on a cosmic ghost hunt to fnd and study it for over 80 years, following a couple of perplexing discoveries. First, Swiss-American astronomer Fritz Zwicky observed that galaxies in the Coma cluster were moving so quickly they should have been fung away into space — yet they remained gravitationally bound to the cluster by unseen matter. Then in the 1970s, American astronomer Vera Rubin discovered the same type of problem in individual spiral galaxies. Stars toward the edge of the galaxy m...

Imagine you planted a fower and instead of its growth slowing as it reached its mature height, it suddenly shot up like Jack’s beanstalk in the classic fairy tale instead. Or what if you threw a baseball up into the air and instead of falling back down it rocketed up even faster like it was equipped with an invisible jetpack? That’s similar to what astronomers have discovered about the universe’s expansion. After the big bang sent the universe’s contents hurtling apart, scientists thought the expansion would gradually slow down. But instead galaxies are racing away at an ever-increasing clip, swept apart by an unseen power dubbed dark energy. All the stars in our galaxy, the particles in...

In little more than a generation, we’ve gone from knowing only our own solar system to fnding thousands of more distant worlds, called exoplanets. As new exoplanet discoveries continue to pour in, scientists are building an ever-more-complete catalog of the worlds that grace our galaxy. Roman will use three methods (microlensing, transits, and direct imaging) in a sweeping search expected to uncover around 100,000 new exoplanets — a staggering leap compared to the nearly 6,200 currently known. 12 Roman will monitor hundreds of millions of stars watching for tiny surges in starlight that signal a microlensing event. This light-bending phenomenon occurs when two stars align closely from our...

Designing a mission that can conduct the science listed above gives us a powerful tool that can perform a wide array of additional science, too. Even just probing dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanets as thoroughly as Roman will do automatically gives astronomers a treasure trove of data they can comb through for many other purposes. That includes discovering and characterizing rogue planets, isolated black holes, starquakes, kilonova explosions, nebulae, cosmic voids, the interstellar medium, stellar streams, planet-forming disks around nearby stars, and much more. Roman will use three primary observing modes. Its time-domain surveys will repeatedly scan large swaths of sky, and stitc...