Just nine months after its launch, NASA’s latest space telescope has produced an amazing map of the universe unlike any we’ve seen before.
The Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, the Epoch of Reionization and Ice Explorer (SPHEREX) is a two-year-long mission designed to study the universe in infrared light. It began science operations in May, yet the mission has already completed the first of four full-sky maps, showing the universe in an image that includes more than 100 colors.
“SPHEREx’s superpower is that it captures the entire sky in 102 colors approximately every six months,” said Beth Fabinski, SPHEREx project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). in a statement With new map. “It’s an amazing amount of information to be gathered in a short period of time.”
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read more: NASA’s new space telescope will see the universe in 102 colors
Space telescopes are typically optimized either to study a small section of the sky in multiple wavelengths of light or to survey vast areas of the universe in just a handful of wavelengths. SPHEREx offers the best of both: With six special filters, the telescope can separate light from 102 different wavelengths.
It’s powerful because of a fundamental feature of the universe: As light travels across the expanding universe, it stretches. Light coming from farther away is both older and more dispersed, meaning it has a longer wavelength than light coming from closer objects.
Scientists can find the distance of an object by using information obtained from its light. In turn, what SPHEREx is producing is not a flat map of the sky, but a three-dimensional atlas of everything we can see in the universe.
Mission scientists hope the atlas can solve three major challenges: mapping the many major types of ice in and around our galaxy, matching all the light produced throughout the history of the universe, and taking a look at the earliest moments after the big bang.
But astronomers say data from SPHEREx will inform studies far beyond these narrow topics. For example, its full-sky view will illuminate the asteroids and comets scattered across our solar system. And by comparing repeated scans of the sky, it can reveal the explosive deaths of rapidly changing so-called transitory, massive stars, such as supernovae.
“This is really mapping the sky in a new way,” said Olivier Doré, a cosmologist at JPL and the California Institute of Technology and project scientist for SPHEREx. scientific American Before the launch of the telescope. “It’s about opening a new window on the universe.”
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