A new simulation shows how NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will turn back the cosmic clock, unveiling the evolving universe in ways that have never been possible before when it launches by May 2027. With its ability to rapidly image enormous swaths of space, Roman will help us understand ho
in a tapestry the size of the observable universe. With a broad enough view of that tapestry, we can see that the large-scale structure of the universe is web-like, with strands that extend hundreds of millions of light-years. Galaxies are primarily found at intersections of the filaments, with vast “That’s how the cosmos looks now. But if we could rewind the universe, we would see something very different.
Over hundreds of millions of years, the clumps drew in more and more material. They grew large enough to form stars, which were gravitationally drawn toward the dark matter that forms the invisible backbone of the universe. Galaxies were born and continued to evolve, and eventually, planetary systems like our own emerged.
“Simulations like these will be crucial in connecting unprecedented large galaxy surveys from Roman to the unseen scaffolding of dark matter that determines the distribution of those galaxies,” said Sangeeta Malhotra, an astrophysicist at Goddard and a co-author of the paper.Studying such vast cosmic structures with other space telescopes isn’t practical because it would take hundreds of years of observations to stitch together enough images to see them.
The Roman Space Telescope is a NASA observatory designed to unravel the secrets of dark energy and dark matter, search for and image exoplanets, and explore many topics in infrared astrophysics. Credit: NASA
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