NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman space telescope will capture thousands of puzzling structures called cosmic voids.
With NASA’s operations under existential threat from the Trump administration, maybe it’s not surprising that the agency will be taking a much needed moment to zone out and gaze into a void or two — albeit in a billion-light-year stare that’ll plumb the mysteries of the abyss.
On Monday, the agency described how a survey will use its upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope to inspect puzzling regions of the universe called cosmic voids where few, if any, galaxies are found.
Though they appear empty, the voids could contain insights into the universe’s evolution — and illuminate the mysterious forces that govern it, dark matter and dark energy.
“Roman’s ability to observe wide areas of the sky to great depths, spotting an abundance of faint and distant galaxies, will revolutionize the study of cosmic voids,” said Giovanni Verza of the Flatiron Institute and New York University, lead author of a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal demonstrating how Roman could examine voids, in a NASA statement.
Cosmic voids potentially challenge a key notion in astrophysics known as the Copernican or cosmological principle. An extension of Copernicus’ insight that the Earth does not occupy a special place in the universe, the principle holds that on the largest scales, the universe should appear largely homogenous with matter evenly and randomly distributed.
