The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to launch from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center shortly before 7:30 a.m. Aug. 30. Researchers from the University of Pittsburgh have spent decades working on Roman (pictured above) along with other recent missions, including the Vera C. Rubin Legacy Survey of Space and Time and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument.
Two of those professors are Michael Wood-Vasey and Jeffrey Newman, both in the Department of Physics and Astronomy in the Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences. Wood-Vasey is working with Mi Dai, a research assistant professor, to investigate the nature of dark energy using light emitted from a specific type of star known as a type Ia supernova.
Dark energy is a mysterious component of the universe that is causing the expansion of the universe to speed up despite the attractive force of gravity. The extra “push” provided by dark energy is greater than gravity’s ability to pull objects together.
Newman and Brett Andrews, a research associate professor, are working to turn the detailed images from Roman into accurate 3D maps of the universe. Newman is leading efforts to obtain new data from the Subaru Telescope in Hawaii that will be used to refine methods for making these maps, including extending them to include the most distant galaxies.
Once online, Roman will capture thousands of supernovae, as well as track the gravitational effects of dark matter — an as-of-yet unidentified class of matter that makes up most of the matter in the universe — among other projects, such as creating a survey of planets outside our solar system, known as exoplanets.
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