Thursday, April 13, 2023

3955 - NANCY GRACE TELESCOPE - back in time?

 

-   3955 -    NANCY  GRACE  TELESCOPE  -  back in time?    The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will 'rewind' the universe.   The powerful space telescope will take a vastly wider look at the universe than Hubble or the James Webb Space Telescope.


------------  3955  -  NANCY  GRACE  TELESCOPE  -  back in time?

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-   The telescope will turn back the "cosmic clock" and allow astronomers to see space in a way they never have before. This should help scientists understand how the universe evolved from a sea of densely packed particles into the cosmos we see today full of stars and galaxies.

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-   Set to launch no sooner than May 2027, Roman's power to revolutionize astronomy in just 63 days Roman can image an amount of sky that it would take the Hubble Space Telescope 85 years to capture.

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-    The Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes are optimized for studying astronomical objects in-depth and up close, so they're like looking at the universe through pinholes.   To solve cosmic mysteries on the biggest scales, we need a space telescope that can provide a far larger view. That's exactly what Roman is designed to do.

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-   A patch of sky measuring 2 square degrees, equivalent to 10 times the apparent size of the full moon in the night sky over 5 million galaxies are represented.   This same simulation can model tens of millions of galaxies in less than a day, something that would take years with more conventional methods.

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-   This could include investigating the nature of dark energy,  the force that is driving the accelerating expansion of the universe ,  and dark matter, the substance that is almost completely invisible despite composing around 85% of the matter in the cosmos.

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-    How Roman will investigate dark matter and dark energy?  Both galaxies and the clusters they sometimes form grow in "clumps" throughout the universe that are connected by invisible threads of dark matter. Galaxies are positioned along these dark matter filaments at the points at which they intersect. Between these strands are tremendous cosmic voids.

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-    This creates a tapestry of the universe with a web-like structure extending for hundreds of millions of light-years that can only be seen with an incredibly broad view.  This picture would look very different to astronomers if they could view it as it appeared much earlier in the universe's 13.7-billion-year history.

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-    Rewinding cosmic time would reveal the early universe as a uniform primordial sea of plasma composed of charged particles with overly dense patches that would collapse under their own gravity to birth the first stars over the course of hundreds of millions of years.

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-   Drawn towards the gravitational pull of dark matter, these first stars would then group into galaxies that will go on to evolve to be populated by planetary systems like our solar system.

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-   Roman will be able to look back at various stages of this progression as the universe began to take shape. Because dark matter's gravitational influence helps determine the distribution of galaxies, watching it aid in the formation of early galaxies could shed light on the nature of this mysterious form of matter as it plays its role as the universe's "invisible backbone."

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-    On a smaller scale, this look back in time could also allow astronomers to see the effect of dark matter as it forms invisible haloes around early galaxies, thus revealing how they evolve individually.  Roman will also allow astronomers to rewind the recent accelerating expansion of the universe to learn more about dark energy, the force that drives this expansion.

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-   Because of its broad coverage of the sky, the telescope will capture an unprecedented number of galaxies in its field of view and the distribution of those galaxies in our universe, which will allow us to understand the effect of dark energy on large cosmological scales and the clustering and evolution of galaxies.

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-    Roman's sweeping celestial surveys will be able to map the universe up to a thousand times faster than Hubble, with the telescope moving rapidly from one observational target to the next.

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-     Roman, who passed away on December 26, 2018 at the age of 93, was affectionately known as "the mother of Hubble," the nickname she earned as a result of her tireless advocacy for new tools that would allow astronomers to study the broader universe. This push would eventually lead to the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990.

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                   April 12, 2023         NANCY  GRACE  TELESCOPE  -  back in time?         3955                                                                                                                          

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--------------------- ---  Thursday, April 13, 2023  ---------------------------

 

 

 

 

         

 

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