NASA's Roman Telescope Is In Space

Nancy Grace Roman has launched, Webb sees little red dots merging, black holes make a mess when eating, and there's a decagon at Saturn's south pole. And on Space Bites Plus, figuring out how a supermassive black hole got kicked out of its galaxy. All this and more in this week's Space Bites. Well, we've been talking about it for years, and I can't believe it actually happened, and that is that the Nancy Grace Roman Observatory is safely in space. The launch happened on August 30th at around 7.30 in the morning. And like the launch is the scariest part of any one of these missions for me. And yet it just took off, there was no delays. It just took off at the appointed time on its Falcon Heavy rocket. Nancy Grace Roman was put on the right trajectory for it to head off to the L2 Lagrange point. Did another maneuver shortly after launch, and now it's going to take about 100 days for it to make its way up to the Earth-Sun L2 Lagrange point, and this is the same place where James Webb is, where the Gaia mission was, like this is the perfect place to put a telescope if you want to put the Earth, the Sun, and the Moon all in the same spot in the sky and just like ignore them. So for those of you who are wondering, like, what's all the fuss about the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope? You know, the new people who haven't watched my content before, more than a decade ago, the National Reconnaissance Office reached out to NASA and said they had two spare mirrors that they no longer needed for spy satellites, and if NASA could come up with any ideas to use them for. NASA said, yes, please. And then they designed one of them as the Wide Field Infrared Survey, or WFIRST. And then it was renamed to the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope after Nancy Grace Roman, who was the chief astronomer at NASA and was sort of largely called the mother of Hubble. And unfortunately, she passed away in 2018, so she didn't get a chance to see this mission really come together. And so Nancy Grace Roman has a mirror that is the same size as the one on the Hubble Space Telescope. It has the same sensitivity and resolution as the Hubble Space Telescope, but it has a much wider field of view. It can see 100 times the view that Hubble can in one image, and it's also equipped with all of the most modern technology. We think about Hubble, it started out in 1990, it had some upgrades, but still, that is some old technology. Nancy Grace Roman has the newest stuff. It's going to be capturing an enormous amount of information about the Universe. It's going to be sending home 1.4 terabytes of data every day, and its largest images that it's going to be making will have a trillion pixels in them. And Nancy Grace Roman has a couple of priorities. Its main job is to do this wide field survey of the Universe. It's looking in the infrared, and it's going to be mapping out the large scale structure of the Universe. When we look out into the Universe, we see that there are these giant voids, and then there are these walls and strings of galaxies and galaxy clusters. And over time, as the Universe has been expanding, these voids get bigger, and all of the connective tissue of the galaxies sort of get thinner and stretched out. And that there's two major forces that are operating on this large scale structure of the Universe. You've got dark energy, which is accelerating the expansion of the Universe. When did that kick in? Has it been constant throughout the entire history of the Universe? Or is it a more recent thing? Or is it actually changing? It's not a constant, it's a variable. And so when Nancy Grace Roman looks out into the Universe, it will see the Universe essentially at different times, because the farther you look, the more you're looking back in time. And so astronomers will be able to really precisely measure that accelerating expansion of the Universe. But then you've got dark matter, the gravitational force that is pulling things together, concentrating matter and allowing the voids to expand. And thanks to Nancy Grace Roman, astronomers will be able to measure that influence of dark matter and dark energy throughout most of its history. But the part that I'm really excited about Nancy Grace Roman is that it also has a coronagraph on board. It's not just going to be looking at giant galaxy clusters, it's going to be looking at stars trying to see the planets that are orbiting around them. James Webb has a coronagraph on board that allows it to block the light from the star and be able to reveal the fainter planets nearby. It can do this for red dwarf stars, you know, stars where it's maybe 10,000 times as bright in the infrared as its planet. But Nancy Grace Roman will be able to see planets that are next to a star that is 100 million times brighter. That gets us Jupiter-sized worlds orbiting around Sun-like stars. Now this isn't the dream, another Earth around another Sun, but still this is demonstrating this increase in technology and it sets the stage for what comes after that, which will be the Habitable Worlds Observatory. So everything is in place, Nancy Grace Roman is making its way up to the L2 Lagrange point. It'll go through a commissioning phase where they test out all of the instruments, but it should be fairly quick compared to James Webb. We probably will see first light, the first images from this telescope before the end of the year. And we've got coverage of the launch by Alan Boyle on Universe Today. All right, let's talk about little red dots again, because I am obsessed. And so this is a story that was written by Evan Goff on Universe Today. I never know how much of a background to give, but I will give sort of my standard little red dot background, which is that this is a mysterious class of objects that were discovered by James Webb. One of the first sort of brand new things that James Webb found were these little red dots. And, you know, we don't know what they are, but we know that they were relatively small on the order of a few tens of light years across. And they were red. You know, they're now way off into the infrared, thanks to the expansion of the Universe, but they started out red. So imagine this sort of red blob. Now what is it? It could be a gigantic star, although it would be a really, really big star that, you know, the common thought is that this is some kind of supermassive black hole in the making, or maybe there's a black hole surrounded by a cloud of dust or even just hydrogen gas. Although there's been more exotic ideas, like maybe this is a proto globular cluster. We see these little red dots early on in the Universe within this first, say, 500 million to a billion years, and then we don't see them after that. So they played some role in the evolution of the Universe. They're still around us today, whatever they turned into. And now astronomers have found four examples of little red dots in the process of merging, or at least orbiting around each other. Binary little red dots. This is some really cool research work done by some astronomers. They were able to pick out the individual little red dots that were side by side and rule out that these were just like one object, those artifacts. You've got four examples of little red dots. There's a little line in the corner of these images, and that line is about 5,000 light years long. And so that means that these little red dots are on the order of in the 5,000 to 10,000-ish light years apart from each other. When you think about the size of the Milky Way, say the Milky Way is 100,000 light years across, 120,000 light years across. So these things are far from each other, but on a stellar scale, at a galactic scale, they're right next to each other. And the typical thing that you see with, say, supermassive black holes, these things will orbit around each other, get closer and closer, and eventually merge into one larger object. So we still don't know what they are, but it appears that these things merged early on in the history of the universe. And like, I don't want to get ahead of this, but it really feels like we are starting to put together the story of where we got supermassive black holes from. But you didn't hear it from me. I'm just a journalist, not a scientist. Alright, our next story comes from Laurence Tognetti, and this is about the temperature inside Mars. So Mars is cold and dry today, of course, it has about a tenth the mass of the Earth. And so without a large amount of mass, it cooled down relatively quickly compared to the Earth. But we do see volcanism, obviously, on Mars, like the biggest volcanoes in the solar system are located on Mars. And in the past, it had a magnetic field that protected it from cosmic radiation the same way that the Earth does. But then at some point in the past, it cooled down, its dynamo shut down, and it was no longer protected from radiation from space. But what is the interior like today? When NASA's InSight mission went to Mars, it had an experiment on board that was designed to probe into the ground and test temperature differences. And unfortunately, they weren't able to get this experiment into the ground on Mars. And so they weren't able to find this out. And now scientists have figured out another very clever way to get a sense of how the temperature of Mars is changing from hemisphere to hemisphere. They tracked the orbits of spacecraft around Mars. There are several spacecraft, you've got Mars Odyssey, you've got the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. And they were able to detect these slight variations in their orbits over time, you know, add up hundreds, thousands of orbits, you get these variations, and the variations are caused by changes in the gravity well of Mars, regions of higher density and regions of lower density. And this allowed scientists to map out where the regions of higher density are on Mars. They were able to work out where there's probably higher temperature rock on the interior of Mars. They estimate that the interior of Mars in the southern hemisphere is about 200 to 400 degrees Celsius warmer than the northern hemisphere. And when we look at the hemispheres of Mars, like they are very different. The southern hemisphere of Mars is also known as the Raised Highlands. It's like one to three kilometers higher altitude than the northern part of Mars. And so really, the hemispheres are very different, but we kind of don't know why. And so because the southern hemisphere is thicker, this could have prevented the heat from escaping out as quickly as it did in the north. And so warmer temperatures inside in the south than there are in the north. And here's another story by Lawrence Tognetti. It's estimated that there are about 100 million black holes in the Milky Way. And like, that's a lot. And to make things even worse, they're pretty much invisible. And that is because black holes can absorb everything that falls into them, all the radiation that falls into them. They don't emit any light because you need to be going faster than the speed of light to escape from them. And so we only see black holes when they interact with some other object, mainly a star. When you get a black hole in orbit with another star, a binary star system where one of them is a black hole, then you can detect the presence of the black hole. Essentially, you see a star that is wobbling back and forth, orbiting nothing. But if the star gets too close to the black hole, then the tidal forces from the black hole will be able to tear material away and put it into the swirling accretion disk around the black hole. And astronomers were using the Swift Space Telescope to analyze a black hole. And, you know, this is important just because, you know, we've been talking about how NASA's Swift satellite is on a decaying orbit and the attempt to rescue the spacecraft has failed. Well, here's the kind of science that Swift was doing. So they're able to study the X-rays coming from the region around the black hole. And they're able to determine when the black hole had fed on material from the star. But then they noticed that, in fact, it was still blasting out radiation and material from its jets long after it had finished pulling material off of the star. And what it appears is that you get essentially this buildup of material into this accretion disk around the black hole. The black hole can't eat everything that's on its plate. And so it works its way through the material and continues to sort of blast out radiation from the environment around it. And we talk about this like nothing can come from the black hole. But when you get this accretion disk swirling around the black hole, well, that can emit radiation that can emit X-ray radiation, especially. And so it's believed that the black hole was too small to be able to consume all of the material at once and kind of barfed out the leftovers out into space. And so astronomers were able to detect it from the Swift Space Telescope. And it shows that there's this kind of delay from when a black hole starts to feast on material from a companion to when it finally settles back down again, has cleared its plate and is ready for more. You're probably familiar with the famous hexagon at the North Pole of Saturn. Well, a new feature has been starting to form at the South Pole of Saturn. And it is not a hexagon. It is a decagon. In other words, it is a feature with 10 sides. And this was initially detected in 2023 by the Hubble Space Telescope. And researchers have been watching this stabilize over time. And it's not just a surface feature. They can see how it's actually digging down through multiple layers in the atmosphere. So the hexagon at the North Pole was first discovered by the Voyagers back in the 80s. And you know, when it was first seen, it was a total mystery. People couldn't figure out how you would get such a thing. Well, it's this idea of a standing wave. And researchers were able to actually recreate the shape of the hexagon in rotating fluids in the lab. There was like a science experiment in science world where you could you could rotate this fluid on a table and get weird standing geometric structures. And so something like that is happening on Saturn. It's turning into a hexagon at the north and appears to be turning into a decagon at the South Pole. And it's strange that it's appearing now. But we know that Saturn has quite severe seasonal changes throughout the course of its orbit around the sun. And so perhaps that plays some kind of role as well. Every week we do a vote on our channel where you tell us what you thought was the best space news story of the week and the winner last week was MMX and Nancy Grace Roman are about to launch. I wonder what this week will be. Anyway, we're going to find out we're going to put this week's vote into the post tab on our channel. So if you have a second, go find the vote and tell us what you think is the most important space story of the week. Of course, the best chance to see that vote. Click on subscribe to the channel. Click on the notifications bell. Like this video. That will guarantee it. I think. Okay. It's just a personal opinion. Please. All right. Here's another story from Alan Boyle. And this one, we're going to talk about dark matter. Now, dark matter, invisible particle accounts for most of the mass of the universe. You know, the drill. Most searches for dark matter come from astronomers looking through the telescopes. They're measuring the influence of dark matter from its gravity. But one theory for dark matter is that it is some kind of particle. And so if it is a particle, then we should be able to detect it in various experiments here on Earth to one detector that's been running for a while is called Lux Zeppelin Dark Matter Experiment. This is a 10 ton shielded tank of liquid xenon and has a bunch of detectors that are around it. And they're watching for flashes of light from anything that is making its way into this experiment. And it's shielded. It's underground. It's not going to be hit by cosmic radiation. And so anything that actually causes some kind of event inside the tank has to have some sort of source. You know, you can have radioactivity nearby and the Earth and things like that. Researchers analyzed 220 days worth of data collected by it in 2023 and 2024. And they started out looking for lightweight particles, the kinds of things that are most models of the dark matter particles predict. And they didn't find anything. But then they found one strange event that they were unable to come up with an explanation for. And whatever this thing is, it would have to have about 200 times the mass of a proton. And some models of dark matter predict particles that are that heavy. But it's only one event. And that is not going to give you the kind of statistical certainty that you would want to say, yes, we have detected the particle that is responsible for dark matter. The researchers say that, you know, you'd want to find multiple events, you'd want to find different energy levels. And in fact, you'd want to set up different tanks of different fluids, maybe not liquid xenon, maybe you switch to liquid argon. And if you still find the same kinds of events, but it's still a really intriguing single event. You know, we talk about how you want to get like five sigma, six sigma, you know, the discovery of the Higgs boson was six sigma. This is 2.6 sigma. So there's only a point five percent chance that it could just be explained by some background interaction. So so that's like almost nothing, but it's, you know, ninety nine point five percent that is caused by some particle point five percent by some background event. But, you know, this is very exciting for the field of earth based dark matter detector experiments. And there's like a bunch of these around the world that are going on right now. And so if they can detect one event, then the other groups working on this can sort of tune their detectors as well and see if they can confirm the results. So we're about to enter Mercury news time. And that is because the European Space Agency's BepiColombo mission has arrived at Mercury. Well, kind of, you know, getting to Mercury is actually a really challenging process. You actually need more energy to get to Mercury than you need to get to Pluto. And so the way BepiColombo has been making its way to Mercury is to do gravitational assists in the region, Venus, Mercury and so on. Well, now it has finally gotten the right velocity to be able to go into orbit around Mercury. It's been taking about eight years to make this journey. And so at the time that I'm recording this, the Mercury transfer module separated from the spacecraft and then it's going to go into orbit around Mercury on November 21st. And then the Mercury Planet Orbiter, this is the ESA mission and the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter, that's the Japanese mission that are kind of connected together. They are going to separate on December 9th and 10th. And then we will have two spacecraft in orbit around Mercury and we will start to get new pictures of Mercury for the first time. The last time we got pictures there was back in 2011. I hope you're enjoying this week's episode of Space Bites. And if you're watching this on YouTube, then you had to suffer through an ad at the But we try to turn off all the ads everywhere else that we can. For example, you can watch this exact episode over on Patreon completely for free and see no ads. There's no ads in our newsletter. There's no ads on our website. There's no ads. So if you want to watch this episode totally for free, you don't have to become a patron, you can just watch it right now. I'll put a link down in the show notes. I'm going to let you know how I feel about the last flagship telescope in a few decades. First, I'd like to thank our patrons. Thanks to Abe Kingsent, Andrea Pedretti, Brian Bode, Cairdwin, Chuck Hawkins, Commander Baylock, David Gilton, David Matts, Enthraller Reading and Math for Toddlers, Evan Dot Pro, James Clark, Jeremy Manner, Jim Burke, Marcel Smits, Michael Purcell, NASA Ocean Guide, Nord Space, OneStepForAnimals.org. Please follow my nephew at vbrick6994, Ren Kaidu, Richard Williams, Sean Sargent, Stephen Feinlein-Munley, Team 49, Telescope Scana, Vlad Sheplin, Wolfgang Klotz, and ZeldaBorg Galactic Defender who support us at the Master of the Universe level, and all our patrons. All your support means the Universe to us. So with Nancy Grace Roman, we have reached the final flagship space telescope that we are going to see launched probably in a couple of decades. That sucks. You know that there is nothing else really waiting in the wings. We had James Webb, and now we have Nancy Grace Roman. And the next really big flagship mission will probably be the Habitable Worlds Observatory, but that is probably not until the 2040s. So until then, we're just going to have to make do with the missions that we have. Now, there are smaller non flagship missions coming. We've got Plato coming from the European Space Agency, Ariel coming from the European Space Agency. There's other smaller missions coming from NASA. We're going to see stuff coming from China. You know, we're going to get China's version of the Hubble Space Telescope, which is going to launch and that will be a pretty big flagship mission. But still, you know, we're going to have to wait a long time for that next big flagship in my 70s when it launches. Yeah. So good job, Nancy Grace Roman. I'm sure we will give us tons and tons of science, and we will look forward to the next great observatory. All right. We'll see you next time.