NASA's Roman to Study Dark Energy via Supernovae

This video sparkles with synthetic supernovae from the OpenUniverse project, which simulates observations from NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. More than a million exploding stars flare into visibility and then slowly fade away. The true brightness of each transient event has been magnified by a factor of 10,000 for visibility, and no background light has been added to the simulated images. The pattern of squares shows Roman's full field of view.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and M. Troxel

The universe is ballooning outward at an ever-faster clip under the power of an unknown force dubbed dark energy. One of the major goals for NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is to help astronomers gather clues to the mystery. One team is setting the stage now to help astronomers prepare for this exciting science.

"Roman will scan the cosmos a thousand times faster than NASA's Hubble Space Telescope can while offering Hubble-like image quality," said Rebekah Hounsell, an assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland-Baltimore county working at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and a co-principal investigator of the Supernova Cosmology Project Infrastructure Team preparing for the mission's High-Latitude Time-Domain Survey. "We're going to have an overwhelming amount of data, and we want to make it so scientists can use it from day one."

Roman will repeatedly look at wide, deep regions of the sky in near-infrared light, opening up a whole new view of the universe and revealing all sorts of things going bump in the night. That includes stars being shredded as they pass too close to a black hole, intense emissions from galaxy centers, and a variety of stellar explosions called supernovae.

This data sonification transforms a vast simulation of a cosmic survey from NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope into a symphony of stellar explosions. Each supernova's brightness controls its volume, while its color sets its pitch -- redder, more distant supernovae correspond to deep, low tones while bluer, nearer ones correspond to higher frequencies. The sound in stereo mirrors their locations in the sky. The result sounds like celestial wind chimes, offering a way to "listen" to cosmic fireworks.

Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, M. Troxel, SYSTEM Sounds (M. Russo, A. Santaguida)

Cosmic Radar Guns

Scientists estimate around half a dozen stars explode somewhere in the observable universe every minute. On average, one of them will be a special variety called type Ia that can help astronomers measure the universe.

These explosions peak at a similar intrinsic brightness, allowing scientists to find their distances simply by measuring how bright they appear.

Scientists can also study the light of these supernovae to find out how quickly they are moving away from us. By comparing how fast they're receding at different distances, scientists will trace cosmic expansion over time.

Using dozens of type Ia supernovae, scientists discovered that the universe's expansion is accelerating. Roman will find tens of thousands, including very distant ones, offering more clues about the nature of dark energy and how it may have changed throughout the history of the universe.

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