NASA telescope combines 100 maps of the universe into one: ‘every astronomer is going to find something of value here’
Six months after opening its eyes to the cosmos, NASA’s SPHEREx spacecraft has revealed its first comprehensive, sky-spanning mosaic of the universe.
The first of four such maps expected by SPHEREx, the new composition of more than 100 individual exposures promises to reveal unprecedented detail of the night sky.
“It’s incredible how much information SPHEREx has collected in just six months – information that will be particularly valuable when used with data from our other missions to better understand our universe.” Shawn Domagal-Goldmanthe acting director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said in a statement. statement.
“I think every astronomer will find something of value here,” he added, “because NASA missions allow the world to answer fundamental questions about how the universe came to be and how it changed to ultimately make it a home for us.”
“102 new maps of the entire sky”
Although modest in size and cost, SPHEREx (short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) is designed to solve some of astronomy’s greatest mysteries, from exploring the explosive beginnings of the universe to finding the icy ingredients delivered to planets that might have helped life emerge.
The defining strength of SPHEREx is its panoramic vision. The spacecraft surveys the entire sky every six months, splitting incoming light into 102 distinct infrared “colors,” invisible to the human eye. The first of these observations, its new map released in December 2025, will allow scientists to map the positions of hundreds of millions of galaxies in three dimensions and study stars, dust and other cosmic objects in remarkable detail.
“We essentially have 102 new maps of the entire sky, each in a different wavelength and containing unique information about the objects it sees,” Domagal-Goldman said in the release.
Look on it
Spear on March 12, 2025, SPHEREx took less than a month to open your eyes to the universe. Its first image, containing more than 100,000 galaxies and stars, signaled to scientists that the spacecraft was working as expected.
During its planned two-year mission, the $488 million telescope will scan the entire night sky every six months and collect data on more than 450 million galaxies. To do this, SPHEREx will capture about 3,600 images per day, according to NASA, with each full-sky pass superimposed on the last to reveal increasingly faint cosmic details.
“It’s an incredible amount of information to put together in a short amount of time,” Beth Fabinskythe deputy project manager of SPHEREx, said in the release. “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.”
One of the main scientific goals of SPHEREx is to study cosmic inflation, a theoretical burst of rapid expansion of the universe that occurred in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang. During that fleeting moment 14 billion years ago, space itself bulged outward, smoothing out the early universe and leaving behind subtle patterns, or ripples, that still influence the distribution of galaxies today.
By mapping the universe in three dimensions on such an enormous scale, SPHEREx is should record the statistical distribution of these inflationary ripples, which could help scientists refine the elusive physics that fueled the initial growth of the universe.
The observatory will also act as a cosmic scout within the Milky Way, studying vast clouds of gas and dust for interstellar dust grains covered in frozen water, carbon dioxide and other icy compounds that may have contributed to the seeding of planets and potentially life.
Photobomb threats
As SPHEREx continues its investigation, it does so against a backdrop of growing challenge to space astronomy.
Recent simulations modeling how future satellite megaconstellations will appear to orbiting telescopes suggest that more than 96% of SPHEREx’s exposures – as well as those from the Hubble Space Telescope and two planned space observatories, China’s Xuntian Telescope and the European Space Agency’s ARRAKIHS mission – would be negatively affected.
Since each SPHEREx image covers a portion of the sky roughly 200 times larger than the full moon, almost every captured image could contain at least one contrail from a passing spacecraft, the analysis says. published early December in the journal Nature, found.
With a current satellite population of around 15,000 people it is expected to swell to 1 million by the end of the 2030s, astronomers warn that the damage could be irreversible, because once a weak cosmic signal is obscured, the lost scientific information cannot be fully recovered.
