NASA SPHEREx telescope launched to study universe's origins

Thomson Reuters

· Posted: Mar 12, 2025 7:45 AM EDT | Last Updated: 4 minutes ago

A NASA scope was launched into abstraction from California connected Tuesday for a ngo to research the origins of the beingness and to scour the Milky Way postulation for hidden reservoirs of water, a cardinal constituent for life.

The U.S. abstraction agency's megaphone-shaped SPHEREx, short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, was carried aloft by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base successful California.

During its planned two-year mission, the observatory volition cod information connected much than 450 cardinal galaxies, arsenic good arsenic much than 100 cardinal stars successful the Milky Way. It volition make a three-dimensional representation of the cosmos successful 102 colours — individual wavelengths of airy — and volition survey the past and improvement of galaxies.

The ngo aims to deepen the knowing of a improvement known arsenic cosmic inflation, referring to the universe's accelerated and exponential enlargement from a azygous constituent successful a fraction of a 2nd aft the Big Bang that occurred astir 13.8 cardinal years ago.

"SPHEREx is truly trying to get astatine the origins of the beingness — what happened successful those precise fewer archetypal instants aft the Big Bang," SPHEREx instrumentality idiosyncratic Phil Korngut of Caltech said.

"The reigning mentation that describes this is called inflation. As its sanction posits, it proposes that the beingness underwent an tremendous expansion, going from smaller than the size of an atom, expanding a trillion-trillion fold successful conscionable a tiny fraction of a second," Korngut said.

Shawn Domagal-Goldman, acting manager of the Astrophysics Division astatine NASA headquarters, said SPHEREx is going to hunt for "reverberations from the Big Bang — the fractions of a 2nd aft the Big Bang that echoed into the areas SPHEREx is going to straight observe."

SPHEREx volition instrumentality pictures successful each absorption astir Earth, splitting the airy from billions of cosmic sources specified arsenic stars and galaxies into their constituent wavelengths to find their creation and distance.

Within our galaxy, SPHEREx volition hunt for reservoirs of h2o frozen connected the aboveground of interstellar particulate grains successful ample clouds of state and particulate that springiness emergence to stars and planets.

It volition look for h2o and molecules including c dioxide and c monoxide frozen connected the aboveground of particulate grains successful molecular clouds, which are dense regions of state and particulate successful interstellar space. Scientists judge that reservoirs of crystal bound to particulate grains successful these clouds are wherever astir of the universe's h2o forms and dwells.

Being launched on with SPHEREx is simply a constellation of satellites for NASA's PUNCH (Polarimeter to Unify the Corona and Heliosphere) mission to amended recognize the star wind, the continuous travel of charged particles from the sun.

The star upwind and different energetic star events tin origin abstraction upwind effects that play havoc with quality technology, including interfering with satellites and triggering powerfulness outages.

The PUNCH ngo is seeking to reply however the sun's ambiance transitions to the star wind, however structures successful the star upwind are formed and however these processes power Earth and the remainder of the star system.

The ngo involves 4 suitcase-sized satellites that volition observe the prima and its environment.

"Together, they portion unneurotic the three-dimensional planetary presumption of the star corona — the sun's ambiance — as it turns into the star wind, which is the worldly that fills our full star system," said PUNCH ngo idiosyncratic Nicholeen Viall of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Centre.