Just nine months after its launch, NASA's newest space telescope has revealed a stunning map of the cosmos unlike anything we've seen before.
Spectrophotometer for the History of the Universe, the Age of Reionization and the Ice Explorer (SPHEREx) is a two-year mission designed to study the Universe in infrared light. Science operations began in May, but the mission has already completed the first of four all-sky maps, showing the universe in an image that includes more than 100 colors.
“The superpower of SPHEREx 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 the statement accompanying the new map. “It’s an amazing amount of information that can be collected 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 to either study a small region of the sky at many wavelengths of light, or to study larger areas of space at just a few wavelengths. SPHEREx offers the best of both: using six specialized filters, the telescope can isolate light from 102 different wavelengths.
This is a powerful achievement because of a fundamental feature of space: light stretches as it travels through the expanding Universe. Light that travels farther is older and more stretched out, meaning it has a longer wavelength than light from closer objects.
Scientists can determine the distance to an object using information obtained from its light. In turn, SPHEREx creates not a flat map of the sky, but a 3D atlas of everything it can see in the Universe.
Mission scientists hope this atlas can accomplish three big goals: Map several key types of ice in and around us. Milky Way Galaxycounting all the light produced throughout the history of the Universe and going back to the earliest moments after the Big Bang.
But the SPHEREx data will inform research far beyond these narrow topics, astronomers say. Its all-sky survey will illuminate, for example, the asteroids and comets that litter our solar system. And by comparing repeated images of the sky, one could find rapidly changing so-called transients such as supernovaeexplosive death of massive stars.
“This really maps the sky in a new way,” said Olivier Doré, a cosmologist at JPL and Caltech and a SPHEREx postdoctoral fellow. Scientific American before the telescope is launched. “It’s about opening a new window on the universe.”
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