Explore NASA’s most detailed map of the night sky yet
NASA has aimed big for SPHEREx’s first 3D cosmic map. Just six months after beginning operations, the orbiting space telescope has completed its first infrared scan of the entire sky. Although infrared is not visible to the human eye, the map’s 102 wavelengths remain detectable throughout the universe, with the right instruments. According to NASA scientists, this groundbreaking catalog allows astronomers to travel back in time to the earliest moments of the cosmos.
“It’s incredible how much information SPHEREx has collected in just six months – information that will be especially valuable when used with data from our other missions to better understand our universe,” Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of NASA’s astrophysics division, said in a statement. “We basically have 102 new maps of the entire sky, each in a different wavelength and containing unique information about the objects it sees.”
First SPHEREx sky map — Spectrum
With this new trove of data, Domagal-Goldman and his colleagues first hope to glean new information about this incomprehensibly brief (but massively consequential) period. billionth-of-trillionth-of-trillionth one second after the big bang. The forces involved in these pivotal moments would ultimately influence how the universe’s hundreds of millions of galaxies were distributed across space-time. From there, astronomers can begin to examine how these galaxies have evolved over the past 14 billion years.
Infrared may not be visible to us, but the wavelengths contain a wealth of vital information. All stars and planets are born inside dense dust clouds, but they do not emit the type of light that the human eye evolved to see. This means that what may appear to the naked eye as a vacant region of the universe is actually a dynamic and creative cosmic nursery.
Reaching this milestone in infrared spectroscopy was no easy feat. Since May, SPHEREx (short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) has circled the Earth from north to south above the planet’s poles at a rate of 14.5 times per day. During each circuit, SPHEREx gathered approximately 3,600 images within a single strip of sky. The telescope’s field of view then changed naturally over time as Earth continued in its solar orbit. Six months later, SPHEREx finally carried out a 360-degree survey of the sky.
SPHEREx is particularly suited to such a large project. NASA’s Wide Field Infrared Survey Explorer has already made a similar map, but not in as many wavelengths. And although the James Webb Space Telescope houses far more advanced spectroscopic tools, its technical field of view is thousands of times narrower.
“The superpower of SPHEREx is that it captures the entire sky in 102 colors about every six months. That’s an incredible amount of information to collect in a short period of time,” said Beth Fabinsky, SPHEREx project manager. “I think this makes us the mantis shrimp of telescopes, because we have an incredible multi-color visual detection system and we can also see a very broad swath of our environment.”
The observatory’s mission is far from over. From there, the SPHEREx Prime Directive will perform three more whole-sky scans over the next year and a half. From there, researchers will merge the four maps to increase the overall sensitivity of the measurements. The final draft, as well as the current dataset, are available online for free.
“SPHEREx is a medium-sized astrophysics mission that provides major scientific advances,” said Dave Gallagher, director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This is a phenomenal example of how we turn bold ideas into reality and, in doing so, unlock enormous potential for discovery.”
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