Baylor Astrophysicist Helps Prepare NASA’s Roman Space Telescope for Launch

Contact: Kelly Craine, 254-297-9065
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When NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope launches this Sunday, Aug. 30, Baylor University astrophysicist Benjamin Rose, Ph.D., will be there to witness history, as years of preparation begin a new chapter – and open a wider window into the universe.

Roman is scheduled to lift off at 7:26 a.m. EDT aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. 

Named for NASA’s first chief astronomer and a driving force behind the Hubble Space Telescope, Roman is designed to explore some of astronomy’s largest unanswered questions. It will investigate dark energy and dark matter, search for planets beyond the solar system and study how galaxies, stars and black holes have changed across cosmic time.

“We’re really going to change the way that astronomy is done with Roman.” - Benjamin Rose, Ph.D., assistant professor of physics at Baylor

Rose, assistant professor of physics at Baylor, is among the scientists helping NASA prepare for the enormous volume of information Roman will send back to Earth. He is one of four leaders of a NASA-funded project infrastructure team developing the data-analysis pipeline for Roman’s supernova cosmology research. 

 “The Roman telescope has the same depth and spatial resolution as Hubble, but can survey the sky at 1,000 times the rate of speed. So, something that would take 1,000 months in the past would now require just one month of Roman operation,” Rose said. “Its field of view is over 100 times that of Hubble and, unlike past projects, can operate continuously for constant observance.”

That speed will allow Roman to discover cosmic events on a scale astronomers have never experienced, but it also creates a significant challenge.

Roman is expected to produce a 20-petabyte archive during its five-year primary mission, Rose said. That volume of information cannot simply be downloaded to a researcher’s laptop or even easily transferred to a university computing system. Instead, scientists will bring their analyses to the cloud-based data and work within a shared software environment.

“We’re really going to change the way that astronomy is done with Roman,” Rose said.

The search for exploding stars

Rose and his collaborators are preparing the infrastructure needed to identify, calibrate and organize transient objects, which are phenomena that appear, brighten, fade or change over time. The team’s primary focus is Type Ia supernovae, exploding stars whose predictable brightness allows astronomers to measure distances across the universe.

By comparing those distances with how quickly galaxies are moving away, scientists can trace the expansion of the universe and study dark energy, the mysterious force driving that expansion to accelerate. Roman is expected to improve measurements of dark energy and give scientists a clearer picture of how its influence may have changed over billions of years. 

Roman’s sweeping view also will reveal many other short-lived cosmic events. Those could include tidal disruption events, which occur when a star passes too close to a supermassive black hole and is torn apart by its immense gravity. As the stellar debris spirals toward the black hole, it heats up and produces a flare bright enough to be seen across enormous distances.

The mission also is expected to identify thousands of planets outside the solar system, including free-floating worlds that do not orbit a star. Together, these discoveries will help researchers examine questions ranging from planetary formation to the structure and history of the universe.

Discoveries ahead

For Rose, Roman’s greatest promise may lie not only in the questions it was designed to answer, but also in the discoveries no one has anticipated. Its panoramic view, repeated observations and vast public archive will give astronomers opportunities to find rare objects and unexpected phenomena for years to come.

As Roman begins its journey, Baylor space research will help ensure that scientists around the world can turn that unprecedented stream of data into a deeper understanding of the cosmos.

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