Far and Wide: Additional Graphics

Roman will orbit at Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2, or L2. There are many advantages to this location a million miles from Earth. It’s colder there, critical for infrared observations, and Earth never blocks much of the view. Hubble, orbiting only 300 miles above the ground, has more limitations on where it can point at any given time.

This animation shows a representative selection of objects in the universe and then encloses them in a cube and measures each one. Roman’s wide view will allow it to study enough large-scale structure of the universe in high precision for scientists to begin understanding its true nature, including dark energy and dark matter, and viewing early galaxies as a population rather than a few individuals who may or may not be “average.”

Dark matter and dark energy are both large presences in the universe that are only detectable through their effects on normal matter. The brightnesses of faraway supernovae work to measure the distances of galaxies and how dark energy is pushing them apart. The precise shapes of galaxies serve as a way to study the dark matter around them, but these features must be measured very accurately to be useable. Roman’s hardware is particularly precise and well-understood, so the data it collects is especially good for the statistical analysis required, giving scientists a holistic view of how dark matter and dark energy exist and affect the visible universe.

No one telescope can make all the observations necessary to potentially answer fundamental questions like “where do we come from?” and “are we alone?” so NASA and its partners have created several.

Existing exoplanet missions like Kepler and TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) have been extremely successful at finding exoplanets through the transit method, where the planets block some of their host star’s light as they orbit past.  But this method is limited in the systems it tends to find.

This animation shows a sequence of simulated galaxy distributions, starting at 7.9 billion years ago and progressing backwards to 13.3 billion years ago. Only by studying hundreds of millions of galaxies can scientists begin to determine the behavior of the universe as a whole — its large-scale structure, and how it has changed over time.

This animation shows Roman’s High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey projected in equatorial coordinates. Roman will be able to survey thousands of square degrees of sky during its primary mission, enabling studies that were never possible before.