NASA’s newest technology will create enormous panoramic pictures of space in unprecedented detail. (Image courtesy of NASA.)

The powerful space-borne telescope, named after NASA’s first female executive and first Chief of Astronomy, will investigate the newly discovered concept of dark energy, the history of cosmic acceleration as well as the technology for direct imaging and characterization of exoplanets.

Formerly known as the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Telescope, the Roman Space Telescope will be used to help further Astronomy and Astrophysics research by the U.S. National Research Council, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC, Space Telescope Science Institute, and other American research institutions. 

However, new simulations of the telescope point to a wider discovery. The telescope will help scientists find ways to understand planet demographics by searching for myriad rogue worlds as well as determine how planetary systems form, evolve, and break apart. 

Though astronomers discovered planets beyond our solar system, known as exoplanets, in the 1990s, there is still much to be learned about the phenomenon. 

Planets are created when smaller objects collide with one another and sometimes create larger bodies. Violent collisions and close encounters can result in a planet being pulled out of the gravitational grip of its parent star.  In turn, the orphaned world wanders the galaxy alone in the form of an exoplanet. 

These rogue planets could also be formed through clouds of gas and dust, which collapse to form a central planet instead of a star, with moons instead of planets surrounding it. 

The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope compared to the Hubble Space Telescope. (Image courtesy of NASA.)

The Roman telescope will provide insight into the planetary formation and evolution models surrounding these  isolated worlds. It will also determine the abundance and mass of each as well as provide a count of these planets that is at least 10 times more accurate than current estimates. Exoplanets. (Video courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt [Caltech-IPAC].)

The Roman Space Telescope will allow NASA and other research teams to detect island worlds by conducting a large microlensing survey. This means that scientists can find exoplanets by creating an observational effect during the presence of mass warps in the fabric of space-time.

Microlensing allows scientists to systematically search for exoplanets even if they have a low mass. Though these vagabond worlds don’t shine like stars and emit low heat, making them invisible to infrared telescopes, the Roman telescope will be able to detect exoplanets due to its gravitational effects on the light of more distant stars. 

The light from a distant star will bend as it passes through the warped space-time around the planet, which will enable it to act as a cosmic magnifying glass. The planet may also act as a natural magnifying glass if it aligns closely with a more distant star. The effect in the star’s brightness as the star and planet come into alignment reveals data about the planet’s mass.How gravitational microlensing can reveal island worlds. (Video courtesy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab.)

Located nearly a million miles away from Earth in the opposite direction of the Sun, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will be able to detect microlensing events that last as short as one and a half hours, even with low-mass planets. In fact, the telescope will be able to detect free-floating planetary-mass objects over three orders of magnitude in mass. 

In the graph by The American Astronomical Society, the research team randomly selected a hundred events that passed their detection criteria. Scientists can gain a deeper understanding of rogue planets as the telescope will obtain superior microlensing results and sharper views of the planet. 

Samples of simulated magnification curves from events detectable by the Roman telescope at each mass of 103, 102, 10, 1, and 0.1 M⊕, from left to right. The darker curves indicate events that contribute more to the calculated event rate, the vertical dashed lines indicate the positive/negative weighted average of the microlensing timescale, and the horizontal row of gray dashes indicate the W146 cadence (15 minutes) in the three rightmost panels. (Image courtesy of American Astronomical Society.)

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will allow scientists to detect hundreds of planets just like astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, after whom the telescope was named, made tremendous discoveries.