NASA's New Roman Space Telescope Aims To Discover 100,000 Cosmic Explosions

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While the Hubble and James Webb Space Telescopes continue to offer astronomers revolutionary glimpses of our universe, their upcoming sibling may very well upstage them. Scheduled to launch in 2027, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is designed with a field of view at least 100 times larger than Hubble's, with the potential to document light from over a billion galaxies over its career.

Combined with timelapse recording capabilities, Roman will help researchers to better understand exoplanets, infrared astrophysics, and the nature of dark matter .

But it doesn't stop there. According to a study published on July 15 in The Astrophysics Journal , Roman is poised to eventually capture an estimated 100,000 celestial explosions over its lifetime.

These could include everything from supernovae to hungry black holes , but astrophysicists theorize Roman may potentially even find evidence of the very first stars to ever form in the universe.

"​​Whether you want to explore dark energy, dying stars, galactic powerhouses, or probably even entirely new things we've never seen before, this survey will be a gold mine," Benjamin Rose, a physicist at Baylor University and the study's lead author, said in a statement .

Rose and colleagues reached their estimate after running a simulation of the Roman's High-Latitude Time-Domain Core Community Survey . Once in place, the space telescope's survey is designed to scan a single, vast portion of the universe every five days for two years.

Astronomers will compile all of those snapshots into what amounts to cosmic movies, then document every kind of energy blast they find.

"By seeing the way an object's light changes over time and splitting it into spectra—individual colors with patterns that reveal information about the object that emitted the light—we can distinguish between all the different types of flashes Roman will see," explained Rebekah Hounsell , a study co-author and assistant research scientist at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County.