Could the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope Find 100,000 Planets? - The Cosmic Companion April 1, 2021
Exploring a revolutionary instrument that could soon help astronomers discover 100,000 planets...
The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope — due to become one of the great planet-hunting telescopes — might find 100,000 exoplanets among the stars.
An artist’s concept of the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, one of NASA’s great upcoming planet hunters. Image credit: NASA/GSFC
Due for launch in the mid-2020s, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope is destined to become one of the great planet-hunting telescopes.
Although the main mirror at the heart of the Roman Telescope is no larger than the one in the Hubble Space Telescope, the Roman mirror is just 25 percent as massive as its predecessor. With a wider field of view greater than Hubble, this next-generation telescope, formerly known as WFIRST, may discover 100,000 worlds orbiting other stars.
The Roman Telescope will study the sky in infrared wavelengths utilizing two methods to detect exoplanets. The first of these techniques, the transit method, measures dips of light seen from a star as a planet passes “in front of” its stellar parent as seen from Earth. The second method, gravitational microlensing, notes slight increases in light caused by the presence of an exoplanet.
Read more: https://thecosmiccompanion.net/could-the-nancy-grace-roman-telescope-find-100000-planets
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