NASA wants to peer back in time to the beginning of the universe. And with a new space telescope, scientists at the agency should be able to do just that.
The new telescope, slated for launch in either 2024 or 2025, “will map the entire sky to study the rapid expansion of the universe after the Big Bang, the composition of young planetary systems, and the history of galaxies,” according to a statement from NASA.
It will provide a quantum leap from what we can see now, experts said. It’s “like going from black-and-white images to color; it’s like going from Kansas to Oz,” said Allen Farrington, the telescope’s project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The telescope will survey the sky in optical light along with near-infrared light which, though not visible to the human eye, serves as a powerful tool for answering cosmic questions, NASA said. Astronomers will use the mission to gather data on more than 300 million galaxies, as well as more than 100 million stars in our own Milky Way.
The telescope, which will orbit around the Earth once it’s launched, is known as SPHEREx, an acronym for this mouthful: The “Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer.”
SPHEREx should be about the size of a subcompact car and, according NASA, will “map the entire sky four times, creating a massive database of stars, galaxies, nebulas (clouds of gas and dust in space) and many other celestial objects.”
The $242 million telescope, which is scheduled to have a lifespan of about two years, will first look for evidence of something that may have happened less than a billionth of a billionth of a second after the Big Bang, which was some 13 billion years ago. In that split second, “space itself may have rapidly expanded in a process scientists call inflation,” NASA said.
Such sudden ballooning would have influenced the distribution of matter in the cosmos, and evidence of that influence would still be around today, according to NASA. With SPHEREx, scientists will map the position of billions of galaxies across the universe relative to one another, looking for statistical patterns caused by inflation, NASA reported.
The patterns could help scientists understand the physics that drove that expansion.
Another goal of the telescope is to study the history of galaxy formation, starting with the first stars to ignite after the Big Bang and extending to present-day galaxies.
Finally, scientists will use SPHEREx to look for water ice and frozen organic molecules — the building blocks of life on Earth — around newly forming stars in our galaxy.
“This amazing mission will be a treasure trove of unique data for astronomers,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate, in a 2019 statement.
“It will deliver an unprecedented galactic map containing ‘fingerprints’ from the first moments in the universe’s history,” he said. “And we’ll have new clues to one of the greatest mysteries in science: What made the universe expand so quickly less than a nanosecond after the Big Bang?”
The SPHEREx team is slated to spend the next 29 months building the mission components before entering the next mission phase, when those components will be brought together, tested and launched.
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