Cosmic explosions to be captured by new NASA telescope
Scientists expect that a major survey to be undertaken by NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could reveal 100,000 cosmic explosions. These range from exploding stars to feeding black holes. The telescope could even find evidence of some of the first stars in the universe, thought to completely self-destruct and leave no remnant behind.
Cosmic explosions may provide clues to some of the universe’s biggest mysteries including the nature of dark energy, a mysterious pressure that is believed to be accelerating the expansion of the universe.
“Whether you want to explore dark energy, dying stars, galactic powerhouses, or probably even entirely new things we’ve never seen before, this survey will be a gold mine,” said Benjamin Rose, an assistant professor at Baylor University in Waco, Texas, who led a study about the results. The paper is published in The Astrophysical Journal.
The High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey observation program plans to scan the same large region of the cosmos every five days for two years. These observations will then be stitched together by scientists, creating movies that hope to reveal all manner of cosmic explosions.
Among these are exploding stars. The survey will be geared toward finding a particular class of supernova called type Ia. These cataclysms allow scientists to measure cosmic distances and find traces of the expansion of the universe. Understanding how the universe ballooned during different cosmic eras may offer clues around dark energy.
In the new study, the telescope’s entire survey was simulated. The results revealed that it could see around 27,000 type Ia supernovae, around ten times as much as all previous surveys combined.
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