Just nine months after its launch, NASA’s newest space telescope has revealed a breathtaking, unprecedented map of the cosmos.
Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer (SPHEREx) is a two-year mission designed to study the universe in infrared light. Its science operations began in May, but the mission has already produced the first of four full-sky maps, showing the universe in an image including more than 100 colors.
“The superpower of SPHEREx is that it captures the entire sky in 102 colors approximately every six months,” Beth Fabinsky, SPHEREx project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a statement accompanying the new map. “That’s an incredible amount of information to put together in a short amount of time.”
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LEARN MORE: NASA’s new space telescope will see the universe in 102 colors
Space telescopes are typically optimized either to study a small patch of the sky in many wavelengths of light, or to study larger swathes of the cosmos in just a handful of wavelengths. SPHEREx offers the best of both: with six specialized filters, the telescope can isolate light of 102 different wavelengths.
It’s powerful because of a fundamental feature of the cosmos: as light travels through the expanding universe, it expands. Light from farther away is both older and more stretched, meaning it has a longer wavelength than light from closer objects.
Scientists can determine the distance of an object using information from its light. In turn, what SPHEREx produces is not a flat map of the sky but a three-dimensional atlas of everything it can see in the universe.
Mission scientists hope this atlas can solve three big challenges: mapping several key flavors of ice in and around our galaxy, the Milky Way, accounting for all the light produced over the history of the universe, and going back to the first moments after the big bang.
But SPHEREx data will inform studies far beyond these narrow topics, astronomers say. Its full-sky view will illuminate, for example, the asteroids and comets that litter our own solar system. And by comparing repeated scans of the sky, it could reveal so-called fast-evolving transient phenomena, such as supernovae, the explosive death of massive stars.
“This is really mapping the sky in a new way,” Olivier Doré, a cosmologist at JPL and the California Institute of Technology and SPHEREx project scientist, told Scientific American before the launch of the telescope. “It’s about opening a new window on the universe.”
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