Dark energy, exoplanets and black holes: What Nasa’s new Roman telescope will explore

NASA has launched its Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope on an expedition to explore dark matter, dark energy, black holes, and search for exoplanets beyond our solar system. The spacecraft, which took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is scheduled to reach its final orbit around the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point, about a million miles from Earth, in three months.

The Wide Field Instrument of the telescope will enable scientists to study a much larger portion of the sky in a single observation, at least 100 times more than Hubble's. This advanced capability is expected to uncover approximately 100,000 new exoplanets during the telescope's surveys. NASA administrator Nicky Fox stated that Roman will "change the way we look at the Universe."

One of the primary goals of the mission is to identify thousands of worlds in our Milky Way galaxy, while the broader surveys venture farther into space. The search for exoplanets is crucial as one of NASA's main objectives is to answer the question, "Are we alone in the universe?" The telescope's destination is four times more distant from Earth than the Moon, where infrared space cameras operate.

Roman will probe dark matter and dark energy, two phenomena that together account for about 95% of the Universe. Although these phenomena cannot be observed directly, their presence can be inferred from their gravitational effects. Dark energy is the term scientists use for the still-unexplained phenomenon associated with the accelerating expansion of the Universe.