The James Webb Space Telescope might be grabbing all the headlines right now, but NASA has big plans for another space-based telescope too: The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Set to launch in 2027, Roman will survey the sky in the infrared wavelength to learn about big topics in cosmology like dark energy as well as perform a census of exoplanets. Now, NASA has shared more information about the kinds of planets that Roman could find, including the possibility it could take the first image of a Jupiter-like world.
Roman will be armed with a coronagraph instrument which is designed to block out light from very bright objects like stars to allow observation of the planets around them, opening the possibility of directly imaging planets. This is exciting because most exoplanets discovered now are detected indirectly, by looking at the star they orbit. Being able to image an exoplanet directly can give more information, for example about the planet’s atmosphere.
“We will be able to image worlds in visible light using the Roman Coronagraph,” said Rob Zellem, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) who is working on Roman, in a statement. “Doing so from space will help us see smaller, older, and colder planets than direct imaging usually reveals, bringing us a giant leap closer to imaging planets like Earth.”
This also opens up more possibilities in the type of planets that could be discovered. Most methods used to detect exoplanets currently find large, young planets which glow brightly, and are typically located far from their host star. These factors make them easier to spot using current methods. But Roman’s coronagraph could spot rocky, Earth-sized planets, perhaps even within the habitable zone of sun-like stars. In addition, it could view planets in the visible light wavelength as opposed to the infrared wavelength more commonly used now.
“To image Earth-like planets, we’ll need 10,000 times better performance than today’s instruments provide,” said Vanessa Bailey, an astronomer at JPL and the instrument technologist for the Roman Coronagraph. “The Coronagraph Instrument will perform several hundred times better than current instruments, so we will be able to see Jupiter-like planets that are more than 100 million times fainter than their host stars.”
NASA has launched its latest Earth-monitoring mission, a satellite that studies the atmosphere and the oceans and their relationship to climate change. The Plankton, Aerosol, Climate, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) mission launched at 1:33 a.m. ET on Thursday, February 8, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Climate, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite launched aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket at 1:33 a.m. ET, February 8, 2024, from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.
It takes a particular confluence of conditions for rocky planets like Earth to form, as not all stars in the universe are conducive to planet formation. Stars give off ultraviolet light, and the hotter the star burns, the more UV light it gives off. This radiation can be so significant that it prevents planets from forming from nearby dust and gas.
However, the James Webb Space Telescope recently investigated a disk around a star that seems like it could be forming rocky planets, even though nearby massive stars are pumping out huge amounts of radiation. The disk of material around the star, called a protoplanetary disk, is located in the Lobster Nebula, one of the most extreme environments in our galaxy. This region hosts massive stars that give off so much radiation that they can eat through a disk in as little as a million years, dispersing the material needed for planets to form. But the recently observed disk, named XUE 1, seems to be an exception.
The International Space Station (ISS) orbits Earth 16 times a day, which means that at some point it’s likely to pass over your neighborhood. Despite being 250 miles above our heads, it’s actually easy to spot the ISS thanks to the reflection that occurs when the sun’s rays bounce off its solar arrays. You just need to know when to look up.
