A brand-new eye in the sky sets off for the dark universe
The News
On Sunday morning, NASA's brand-new Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope roared off the launch pad on a Falcon Heavy rocket. It's a bus-sized telescope beginning a three-month, one-million-mile trip to its parking spot in deep space, where it will hunt for planets around other stars, map billions of galaxies, and try to spot invisible stuff called dark matter.
Professor Pip patted his bulging green pockets and pulled out two crinkled cardboard tubes — one skinny like a drinking straw, the other fat like a paper-towel roll.
"Ah! Just the thing," he beamed, adjusting his crooked spectacles.
On the twilight hilltop above his little burrow, Mia and Leo sat cross-legged in the cool grass. Overhead, the first stars were blinking on.
"Today, my fellow scientists," Pip announced, tail swishing, "a brand-new telescope named Roman just blasted off into space! And I want you to see why everyone is so excited."
"A telescope in space?!" gasped Leo. "Why can't it just stay on the ground?"
"Curiouser and curiouser!" Pip chuckled. "Let's investigate. Peek through this skinny tube first."
Mia squinted through the straw-sized tube at the sky. "I only see, like… one star."
"Precisely! Now try the fat one."
She swapped tubes and gasped. "Oh! I see LOTS of them!"
"That," said Pip, "is called a field of view. It's how much sky an eye can see at once. Our old space telescope, Hubble, sees a beautiful patch of sky — but a very small one, like your skinny tube. This new Roman telescope's field of view is one hundred times wider. It's like the paper-towel roll."
Leo did the math on his fingers. "One hundred times more sky?!"
"One hundred times more sky, one hundred times more stars, one hundred times more places where a planet might be hiding," Pip nodded. "Which means Roman will find thousands of new planets around other stars, and take pictures of billions of galaxies."
He looked up. "But here's the mysterious part. Most of the universe is made of something we can't see — we call it dark matter and dark energy. We only know it's there because it tugs on things. Roman is going to look at how galaxies are pulled around, so we can finally start to understand what all that invisible stuff is."
"Like a detective!" said Mia.
"Exactly right." Pip tucked his tubes back into his pocket and passed each child a fresh cardboard roll. "Now — you try. Point your paper-towel telescope somewhere new every night for a week. See how much sky you can catch."
Above them, one particularly bright dot moved slowly across the stars. Somewhere out there, Roman was on its way.
Spark a Conversation
- If you could point Roman at anything in the universe, what would you want it to look at first?
- Why do you think we put telescopes in space instead of just on top of a mountain?
- What would it mean if scientists finally figured out what dark matter is made of?