Latest news with #andIcesExplorer
Ammon
02-04-2025
- Science
- Ammon
NASA's SPHEREx telescope 'opens its eyes on the universe', taking stunning debut image of 100,000 galaxies and stars
Ammon News - A new NASA space telescope has turned on its detectors for the first time, capturing its first light in images that contain tens of thousands of galaxies and stars. The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) arrived in orbit atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on March 11. The six released images, collected by the space telescope on March 27, were each snapped by three different detectors. The top three images span the telescope's complete field of view, and are captured again in the bottom three which are colored differently to represent varying ranges of infrared wavelengths. Within each image's full field of view — an area roughly 20 times wider than the full moon — roughly 100,000 light sources from stars, galaxies, and nebulas can be glimpsed. "Our spacecraft has opened its eyes on the universe," Olivier Doré, a SPHEREx project scientist at Caltech and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in a statement. "It's performing just as it was designed to." Costing a total of $488 million to build and launch, the new telescope has been in development for roughly a decade and is set to map the universe by observing both optical and infrared light. It will orbit Earth 14.5 times a day, completing 11,000 orbits during its lifetime to filter infrared light from distant gas and dust clouds using a technique called spectroscopy. Once it is fully online in April, SPHEREX will scan the entire night sky a total of four times using 102 separate infrared color sensors, enabling it to collect data from more than 450 million galaxies during its planned two-year operation. This amounts to roughly 600 exposures a day, according to NASA. This dataset will give scientists key insights into some of the biggest questions in cosmology, enabling astronomers to study galaxies at various stages in their evolution; trace the ice floating in empty space to see how life may have begun; and even understand the period of rapid inflation the universe underwent immediately after the Big Bang. SPHEREx's wide panorama view makes it the perfect complement for the James Webb Space Telescope, flagging regions of interest for the latter to study with greater depth and resolution. After lofting it to space, NASA scientists and engineers have performed a nail-biting series of checks on the new telescope. This includes ensuring that its sensitive infrared equipment is cooling down to its final temperature of around minus 350 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 210 degrees Celsius) and that the telescope is set to the right focus — something that cannot be adjusted in space. Based on these stunning preliminary images, it appears that everything has worked out. "This is the high point of spacecraft checkout; it's the thing we wait for," Beth Fabinsky, SPHEREx deputy project manager at JPL, said in the statement. "There's still work to do, but this is the big payoff. And wow! Just wow!"
Boston Globe
01-03-2025
- Science
- Boston Globe
NASA telescope will study what put the bang in the big bang
This kind of cosmic expansion would not have been slow and steady. Inflation is an unimaginably faster. It would have transformed the universe from tiny to cosmic is a snap. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up 'How can you ask a bigger question than 'What was it like at the origin of the universe?'' said Phil Korngut, an astrophysicist at Caltech and the SPHEREx instrument scientist. Advertisement The telescope will gather light from about 450 million galaxies and create a three-dimensional map of the universe, including how everything has evolved through time. The goal of SPHEREx (a merciful acronym, for 'Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer') is to gather large amounts of data on the positions of galaxies relative to one another in a large volume of cosmic space. The galaxies are not randomly distributed, but instead form clusters and superclusters and filament-like structures at large scales, with voids in the mix. By looking at the distribution of galaxies across large swaths of the sky, scientists hope to discern evidence about how the early universe looked before it became cosmically large. That in turn could narrow the number of plausible inflation theories. Right now there are many distinct inflationary theories - it's the Wild West of cosmology. In trying to expose these theories to hard data, and narrow the range of possibilities, a mission like SPHEREx could lead to a new understanding of fundamental physics, said James Fanson, project manager for SPHEREx at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Advertisement Much of what physicists know about our universe comes from particle accelerators - huge contraptions, such as the one deep underground near Geneva, where atomic particles are sent on a collision course to see what happens. But the universe can do that kind of thing better. 'There's a limit in what we can do with particle accelerators on the ground when we are smashing atoms together. But the universe is really a high energy experiment,' Fanson said. 'There are very energetic processes in the universe going back to the big bang singularity. We have the opportunity to discover something fundamental about the universe.' Other astronomical surveys have also looked at large numbers of galaxies, but this mission is going wide rather than deep, scanning the whole sky. 'We're casting a broader net,' said the mission's top scientist, James Bock of Caltech. 'We're interested in these statistical fluctuations on large scales, where the signature of inflation is the cleanest.' The telescope will also search for evidence of water and organic molecules in star-forming regions in our own galaxy. Inflationary theory dates to the late 1970s and early 1980s, when physicists were trying to understand why the universe is so uniform at the largest scales, including the cosmic microwave background radiation. MIT physicist Alan Guth, among the founders of inflation theory, had a revelation that the appearance of the cosmos could be explained by a brief inflationary period. In an article published in the MIT Physics Annual 2002, Guth wrote that the big bang theory is incomplete: '[T]he theory says nothing about the underlying physics of the primordial bang. It gives not even a clue about what banged, what caused it to bang, or what happened before it banged. The inflationary universe theory, on the other hand, is a description of the bang itself … ' Advertisement But did that really happen? And if it did happen, how? What were the physics involved? 'We don't yet know for sure if inflation happened,' Jo Dunkley, a Princeton University astrophysicist, said in an email. 'And if it did, we still want to know how it happened - what physical 'field' (or multiple fields) was around at that time that drove the rapid expansion, before there were any particles.' She said SPHEREx could help shine light on inflation theory because it's an all-sky survey that will measure the distribution of galaxies "and will be able to look for these subtle signatures in how galaxies are positioned. It will be really unique in observing the sky in this way." Michael Turner, a cosmologist at UCLA and one of the architects of inflation theory, said in an email that 'the relationship of inflation and the big bang is not settled or simple.' One possibility is that an inflationary event was our big bang, and anything that happened before that point will probably be impossible to measure. But he added, 'If you are a multiverse person, there were and continue to be an infinite [number] of big bangs occurring creating the disconnected regions we cannot see.' So there's that nugget to ponder: The universe we see, which is big, may be only the tiniest, infinitesimal fraction of the grander thing out there.
