Hubbles Most Iconic Images Will Be Smoked By NASAs New Space TelescopeBut Its Not Webb – Forbes

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope could conduct a mega-exposure similar to but far larger ... [+] than Hubbles celebrated Ultra-Deep Field Image.

The James Webb Space Telescope (Webb) will, on July 12, 2022, become an instant icon when NASA and ESA publish a collection of first light photos.

However, its another as yet little talked about space telescope that could become the successoras proven by a simulation by scientists of the kind of mega-exposures it will be able to capture.

The simulation was generated using a new synthetic catalog of galaxies to create a mock universe. Go visit the teams interactive website and you can zoom and pan across the full-resolution image (its incredible!).

Its a NASA infrared space telescope currently in development and scheduled to launch no later than May 2027. Its Galactic Exoplanet Survey its expected to find 100,000 exoplanetsincluding Earth-like exoplanetsand help astronomers understand how the Universe expands.

Although the Roman is often compared to the Hubble because it will have the same size mirror at 2.4-meters, Romans wide-angle lens will give it 100 times the field of view that will allow it to map the Milky Way and other galaxies 100 times faster than Hubble.

However, its wide-field space telescope could work in its favor. Roman has the unique ability to image very large areas of the sky, which allows us to see the environments around galaxies in the early universe, said Nicole Drakos, a postdoctoral scholar at the University of California Santa Cruz, who led the study published in The Astrophysical Journal that contained the simulation. Our study helps demonstrate what a Roman ultra-deep field could tell us about the universe, while providing a tool for the scientific community to extract the most value from such a program.

As a reminder, heres the iconic Hubble Ultra Deep Field, as taken by the Hubble Space Telescope almost 20 years ago. It transformed our view of the early universe, revealing galaxies that formed just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

This view of nearly 10,000 galaxies is called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The snapshot includes ... [+] galaxies of various ages, sizes, shapes, and colours. The smallest, reddest galaxies, about 100, may be among the most distant known, existing when the universe was just 800 million years old. The nearest galaxies - the larger, brighter, well-defined spirals and ellipticals - thrived about 1 billion years ago, when the cosmos was 13 billion years old. The image required 800 exposures taken over the course of 400 Hubble orbits around Earth. The total amount of exposure time was 11.3 days, taken between Sept. 24, 2003 and Jan. 16, 2004.

Its one of the deepest images of the cosmos ever obtained and shows almost nearly 10,000 galaxies. Requiring 800 exposures taken 11.3 days and 400 orbits of the Hubble Space Telescope around Earth, it was taken between September 24, 2003 and January 16, 2004.

The galaxies in this image are of all different ages, sizes, shapes and colours. About 100 are the among the most distant known, some of them existing when the universe was just 800 million years old.

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field gave us a glimpse of the universes youth, but it was too small to reveal much information about what the cosmos was really like back then as a whole, said Brant Robertson, an astronomy professor at the University of California Santa Cruz and a co-author of the study. Its like looking at a single piece of a 10,000-piece puzzle.

He thinks Roman could give us 100 ore pieces of that puzzle, thus giving a fuller picture of what the early universe was like and opening up new scientific opportunities.

So what could Roman produce to rival that iconic image? Heres the synthetic image that visualizes what a Roman ultra-deep field could look like:

his synthetic image visualizes what a Roman ultra-deep field could look like.

And heres an annotated version:

This synthetic image visualizes what a Roman ultra-deep field could look like. The 18 squares at the ... [+] top of this image outline the area Roman can see in a single observation, known as its footprint. The inset at the lower-right zooms into one of the squares of Roman's footprint, and the inset at the lower-left zooms in even further. The image, which contains more than 10 million galaxies, was constructed from a simulation that produced a realistic distribution of the galaxies in the universe. Roman could peer across more than 13 billion years of cosmic history, reaching back to when the universe was only about half a billion years old. Such distant galaxies are extremely faint, so Roman would have to stare at one spot in space for several days to collect enough light from them. The missions wide field of view will provide an incredible amount of data, helping astronomers find rare objects in the epoch of reionization. The large area Roman will observe will also show differences in galaxy properties based on their surrounding environment, allowing astronomers to better understand how early galaxies formed.

The 18 squares at the top of this image outline the area Roman can see in a single observation, with insets in the lower half of the image zooming-in

Excitingly this simulated image contains 10 million galaxies back to when the universe was only about half a billion years old.

Each of the 18 images would take about a week to expose for in order to capture the incredibly faint light.

It will enable astronomers to delve into the epoch of reionization, a period when the first light from stars and galaxies spread ultraviolet energy around a universe then just a half a billion years old.

Formerly known as the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope (WFIRST) until being re-named the Roman after Nancy Grave Roman, NASAs first chief astronomer who was also known as the mother of the Hubble telescope.

According to NASA, the Roman has an expected development cost of $3.2 billion and a maximum cost of $3.9 billion.

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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Hubbles Most Iconic Images Will Be Smoked By NASAs New Space TelescopeBut Its Not Webb - Forbes