The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope (Roman Telescope), which is being developed by NASA at a cost of 3.2 billion dollars (approximately 4.2 trillion won), drew attention to the observation of wandering planets four years before its launch.
NASA said on its official SNS on the 4th that the development of the Roman Telescope is going well, and that there is now a good chance of meeting the scheduled launch date of 2027.
The Roman Telescope, named after former NASA astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, who passed away in 2018, is evaluated as an instrument optimized for observing distant galaxies and exoplanets. In particular, NASA predicted in a report on the 19th of last month that the Roman Telescope would catch about 400 stray planets similar in size to Earth.
Artist’s rendering of an Earth-mass stray planet <사진=NASA 고다드 우주비행센터 공식 홈페이지>
A wandering planet is a celestial body that floats freely in outer space without orbiting around a star. A research team led by David Bennett, a senior researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, who has studied stray planets whose orbital axis is at the center of the galaxy for nine years, claimed in a recent report that trillions of stray planets may exist in the Milky Way. In particular, the research team predicted that most of the wandering planets in the Milky Way had a mass similar to that of Earth.
Astronomers pay attention to stray planets because they are important to the study of the evolution of the universe. Wandering planets are presumed to be bound to the gravitational pull of the celestial body to which the main star belongs and fall apart, or to be born alone in the interstellar cloud like a star or brown dwarf.
In other words, it is a popular opinion in the astronomy community that understanding the birth and growth of wandering planets can take one step closer to the evolution of galaxies. For reference, among the wandering planets discovered so far, the closest to Earth is about 100 light years away.
Comparison of observation areas of the Hubble Space Telescope (right) and the Roman Telescope <사진=NASA 고다드 우주비행센터 공식 홈페이지>
The primary mirror of the Roman Telescope is 2.4 m in diameter, the same as that of the Hubble Space Telescope launched in 1990. However, the wide-field near-infrared camera WFI (Wide Field Instrument) mounted here has a field of view 100 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope, and is equipped with the latest 300 million-pixel imaging device.
Thanks to this, the Roman Telescope has a field of view 100 times that of the Hubble Space Telescope and can map galaxies 1000 times faster than the Hubble Space Telescope. In this process, it is expected to more effectively look into objects that are difficult to observe, such as stray planets formed in space or kicked out of the stellar system.
NASA estimates that the Roman Telescope will be 10 times more sensitive to stray satellites than other space telescopes. The Roman Telescope, which specializes in super-precision and wide-field observations, is expected to more reliably capture the gravitational lensing effect in which the light of a star located behind a very small celestial body is distorted and magnified by the gravitational force of the celestial body.
The Roman Telescope scheduled for launch in May 2027 <사진=NASA 고다드 우주비행센터 공식 홈페이지>
Gravitational lensing is a phenomenon in which space-time is distorted by the enormous mass of a celestial body, distorting the direction of light from the opposite celestial body. If the mass of a star is more than 1 million times that of the Sun, it is called a normal gravitational lens, and if it is smaller than 1 million times and greater than 1/10,000, it is called a microgravity lens.
Gravitational lensing is a way to find exoplanets that are incredibly distant, but they pass by only once every few million years and are hard to spot unless you have a reasonably powerful instrument.
Professor Takahiro Sumi of Osaka University, Japan, who participated in NASA’s wandering planet research, said, “The gravitational lens is essentially the only way to discover celestial objects such as low-mass wandering planets and primordial black holes.” , the process of discovering a celestial body that has not been encountered so far will be truly amazing.”
Reporter Jeong Ian [email protected]
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