Ohio State Helped Build NASA Telescope Scanning for Dark Energy

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will survey hundreds of millions of galaxies, capturing images hundreds of times faster than the Hubble Space Telescope. More than two dozen faculty, students, and scholars at The Ohio State University contributed to the design of Roman’s surveys, including the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey aimed at understanding the universe’s expansion.

“This enormous field of view will allow us to map astronomical objects in a way that we previously couldn’t,” said David Weinberg, a Distinguished University Professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University. Anthony Harbo Torres, a senior graduate student in physics at Ohio State who calibrated the telescope’s image detectors, noted that the mission’s success is attributable to decades of human ingenuity and perseverance.

Roman Telescope’s Wide-Area Survey Maps Cosmic Structure & Expansion

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will survey approximately one billion galaxies, a figure exceeding all previous astronomical detections combined, according to Ohio State astronomer David Weinberg. This large scale of observation is enabled by the telescope’s wide field of view, a feature central to the High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey, a key component of the Roman mission designed to chart the universe’s expansion over cosmic time.

Harbo Torres emphasized the collaborative nature of the endeavor, stating, “It takes so many people to tackle a monumental undertaking like this and make it possible, so I hope that our images inspire a sense of wonder when people see the scale and detail of the things we find.” This meticulous calibration ensures the accuracy of the data Roman will collect, allowing scientists to probe the distribution of dark matter and dark energy with unprecedented precision.

The telescope’s ability to detect objects over 100 million times fainter than what is visible to the human eye will reveal previously unseen structures and phenomena. The High-Latitude Wide-Area Survey specifically aims to map 12% of the sky over a period of just under two years, peering beyond the obscuring dust and stars of the Milky Way.

Weinberg explains that “Mapping clusters of dark matter will help us figure out why gravity on the scale of the universe is so radically different from gravity on the scale of a solar system or galaxy,” highlighting the potential for Roman to resolve a fundamental discrepancy in our understanding of gravitational forces. Ohio State researchers are actively developing the analytical tools necessary to interpret this data, furthering their involvement beyond the telescope’s construction and calibration.

Scott Gaudi, principal investigator of the Roman Galactic Exoplanet Survey Project Infrastructure Team and a professor of astronomy at Ohio State, notes that the telescope’s capabilities will allow scientists to identify extremely rare cosmic events. “Roman is going to allow us to find extremely rare things and things that don’t happen very often,” Gaudi said. “It’s going to be those things that are likely going to surprise us and lead to new avenues of research.” The anticipated wealth of data generated by Roman is expected to empower astronomers worldwide, fostering a collaborative environment for discovery.

He believes this open access to data will be a defining characteristic of the mission, accelerating the pace of astronomical progress. Initial science findings are expected in mid-2027, and the long-term potential of the Roman Space Telescope, along with the contributions of Ohio State’s team, promise to reshape our understanding of the cosmos for decades to come.