When a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket blasts off from Kennedy Space Center as early as Sunday morning, it will be carrying a crucial steppingstone toward astronomers’ grand goal of finding Earth-like exoplanets in the Milky Way.
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope was designed for several high-priority studies of far-distant galaxies, but one of its key tasks closer to home will be an unprecedentedly long stare into the star-packed heart of our galaxy known as the galactic bulge. Roman will spend more than a quarter of its planned five-year primary mission observing this 10,000-light-year-wide region, which is so sprawling and thick with stars that previous telescopes have scarcely probed its depths.
Called the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, this project will focus on a rather narrow band of the Milky Way’s center, a region that’s roughly eight full moons in the Earth’s night sky in size. Anything larger would’ve been biting off more than even mighty Roman, with its panoramic field of view, could readily chew.
“We're not going to see that much of the bulge, but we're going to see very deep into the bulge, and in fact, all the way to the other side of the galaxy,” says Scott Gaudi, an astronomer at Ohio State University and a member of the telescope’s commissioning team.
Even so, astronomers should still discern hundreds of millions of stars within that relatively small slice of sky, explains Kristen McQuinn, leader of the Roman Space Telescope’s mission office.
To read more, click here.