The Nancy Grace Roman Space 'Scope: Due To Launch In May Of 2027... To Look For Clumps Of "Dark" Matter... On Unfathomably Vast Scales...

There is a very sensible argument to the effect that what we now call JWST ought to have been named. . . for Nancy Grace Roman. But she has her own, launching very shortly. . . so I will let it go.

Naming spats aside, what her 'scope might offer. . . may completely revolutionize our understanding of the unseen "glue" that holds galaxies in place, vis a vis one another, and in fact, is the spider web / scaffolding that underpins the entire Universe. Maybe.

This all turns on what Roman is able to discern, on the galaxy wide scales under which she will fire off images. What an amazing time to be alive, indeed. Here's the latest, from Goddard Space Sciences -- and NASA:

. . .Some of the finest, smallest details in the universe – the gaps between elongated groups of stars – may soon help astronomers reveal dark matter in greater detail than ever before. After NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches, by May 2027, researchers will use its images to explore what exists between looping tendrils of stars that are pulled from globular clusters. Specifically, they will focus on the tidal streams from globular clusters that orbit our neighboring Andromeda galaxy. Their aim is to pinpoint a greater number of examples of these tidal streams, examine gaps between the stars, and ideally determine concrete properties of dark matter.

Globular cluster streams are like ribbons fluttering in the cosmos, both leading and trailing the globular clusters where they originated along their orbits. Their lengths in our Milky Way galaxy vary wildly. Very short stellar streams are relatively young, while those that completely wrap around a galaxy may be almost as old as the universe. A stream that is fully wrapped around the Andromeda galaxy could be more than 300,000 light-years long but less than 3,000 light-years wide. . . .

With Roman, astronomers will be able to search nearby galaxies for globular cluster stellar streams for the first time. Roman’s Wide Field Instrument has 18 detectors that will produce images 200 times the size of the Hubble Space Telescope’s near-infrared camera – at a slightly greater resolution.

“Roman will be able to take a huge snapshot of the Andromeda galaxy, which simply isn’t possible with any other telescope,” shared Christian Aganze, the lead author of a recent paper about this subject and a postdoc at Stanford University in California. “We also project that Roman will be able to detect stars individually. . . .”

Now you know. And I do minimize, to this day, the number of references I make to JWST by a surname. Not to be in any manner, vindictive -- but to candidly acknowledge that the collective whyte guy "we" should not have everything named after us. So many have been ignored for so long -- due to sexism, racism and anti-LBGTQ+ bias. Onward.

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