Roman Space Telescope tagged posts

The Roman Space Telescope is designed to directly image exoplanets using complex optomechanical systems developed by the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy

The Roman Space Telescope has been under development for about a decade under NASA’s leadership and is scheduled to launch on Aug. 30, 2026, at 7:26 a.m. EDT. The telescope is named after Nancy Grace Roman, who was considered the architect of NASA’s modern science program and, among other efforts, dedicated herself to the success of the Hubble Space Telescope project.

Roman’s destination is the L2 Lagrange point, a specific location 1...

A popular myth about black holes is that they act like giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, sucking in everything around them. But Wladimir Lyra’s research found a new mechanism around supermassive black holes that is more like a cosmic nursery, giving birth to planets more massive than Jupiter.

“We’re finding objects that are a thousand times the mass of the Earth, but built of pure dust,” Lyra said. “And not only that, but also some of these objects are approaching the mass of the sun.”

Lyra, an associate professor of astronomy at New Mexico State University, began this line of research as a postdoctoral fellow collaborating with Barry McKernan, Saavik Ford and Mordecai-Mark Mac Low at the American Museum of Natural History in 2010.

Bhupendra Mishr...