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By NASA
6 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
NASA’s SPHEREx observatory undergoes integration and testing at BAE Systems in Boulder, Colorado, in April 2024. The space telescope will use a technique called spectroscopy across the entire sky, capturing the universe in more than 100 colors. BAE Systems The space telescope will detect over 100 colors from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies. Here’s what astronomers will do with all that color.
NASA’s SPHEREx mission won’t be the first space telescope to observe hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies when it launches no later than April 2025, but it will be the first to observe them in 102 colors. Although these colors aren’t visible to the human eye because they’re in the infrared range, scientists will use them to learn about topics that range from the physics that governed the universe less than a second after its birth to the origins of water on planets like Earth.
“We are the first mission to look at the whole sky in so many colors,” said SPHEREx Principal Investigator Jamie Bock, who is based jointly at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech, both in Southern California. “Whenever astronomers look at the sky in a new way, we can expect discoveries.”
Short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, SPHEREx will collect infrared light, which has wavelengths slightly longer than what the human eye can detect. The telescope will use a technique called spectroscopy to take the light from hundreds of millions of stars and galaxies and separate it into individual colors, the way a prism transforms sunlight into a rainbow. This color breakdown can reveal various properties of an object, including its composition and its distance from Earth.
NASA’s SPHEREx mission will use spectroscopy — the splitting of light into its component wavelengths — to study the universe. Watch this video to learn more about spectroscopy. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center Here are the three key science investigations SPHEREx will conduct with its colorful all-sky map.
Cosmic Origins
What human eyes perceive as colors are distinct wavelengths of light. The only difference between colors is the distance between the crests of the light wave. If a star or galaxy is moving, its light waves get stretched or compressed, changing the colors they appear to emit. (It’s the same with sound waves, which is why the pitch of an ambulance siren seems to go up as its approaches and lowers after it passes.) Astronomers can measure the degree to which light is stretched or compressed and use that to infer the distance to the object.
SPHEREx will apply this principle to map the position of hundreds of millions of galaxies in 3D. By doing so, scientists can study the physics of inflation, the event that caused the universe to expand by a trillion-trillion fold in less than a second after the big bang. This rapid expansion amplified small differences in the distribution of matter. Because these differences remain imprinted on the distribution of galaxies today, measuring how galaxies are distributed can tell scientists more about how inflation worked.
Galactic Origins
SPHEREx will also measure the collective glow created by all galaxies near and far — in other words, the total amount of light emitted by galaxies over cosmic history. Scientists have tried to estimate this total light output by observing individual galaxies and extrapolating to the trillions of galaxies in the universe. But these counts may leave out some faint or hidden light sources, such as galaxies too small or too distant for telescopes to easily detect.
With spectroscopy, SPHEREx can also show astronomers how the total light output has changed over time. For example, it may reveal that the universe’s earliest generations of galaxies produced more light than previously thought, either because they were more plentiful or bigger and brighter than current estimates suggest. Because light takes time to travel through space, we see distant objects as they were in the past. And, as light travels, the universe’s expansion stretches it, changing its wavelength and its color. Scientists can therefore use SPHEREx data to determine how far light has traveled and where in the universe’s history it was released.
Water’s Origins
SPHEREx will measure the abundance of frozen water, carbon dioxide, and other essential ingredients for life as we know it along more than 9 million unique directions across the Milky Way galaxy. This information will help scientists better understand how available these key molecules are to forming planets. Research indicates that most of the water in our galaxy is in the form of ice rather than gas, frozen to the surface of small dust grains. In dense clouds where stars form, these icy dust grains can become part of newly forming planets, with the potential to create oceans like the ones on Earth.
The mission’s colorful view will enable scientists to identify these materials, because chemical elements and molecules leave a unique signature in the colors they absorb and emit.
Big Picture
Many space telescopes, including NASA’s Hubble and James Webb, can provide high-resolution, in-depth spectroscopy of individual objects or small sections of space. Other space telescopes, like NASA’s retired Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), were designed to take images of the whole sky. SPHEREx combines these abilities to apply spectroscopy to the entire sky.
By combining observations from telescopes that target specific parts of the sky with SPHEREx’s big-picture view, scientists will get a more complete — and more colorful — perspective of the universe.
More About SPHEREx
SPHEREx is managed by JPL for NASA’s Astrophysics Division within the Science Mission Directorate in Washington. BAE Systems (formerly Ball Aerospace) built the telescope and the spacecraft bus. The science analysis of the SPHEREx data will be conducted by a team of scientists located at 10 institutions across the U.S. and in South Korea. Data will be processed and archived at IPAC at Caltech, which manages JPL for NASA. The mission principal investigator is based at Caltech with a joint JPL appointment. The SPHEREx dataset will be publicly available.
For more information about the SPHEREx mission visit:
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/spherex/
News Media Contact
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
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Last Updated Oct 31, 2024 Related Terms
SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe and Ices Explorer) Astrophysics Galaxies Jet Propulsion Laboratory The Search for Life The Universe Explore More
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By NASA
Image data: NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS
Image processing by Gary Eason © CC BY During its 61st close flyby of Jupiter on May 12, 2024, NASA’s Juno spacecraft captured this color-enhanced view of the giant planet’s northern hemisphere. It provides a detailed view of chaotic clouds and cyclonic storms in an area known to scientists as a folded filamentary region. In these regions, the zonal jets that create the familiar banded patterns in Jupiter’s clouds break down, leading to turbulent patterns and cloud structures that rapidly evolve over the course of only a few days.
Citizen scientist Gary Eason made this image using raw data from the JunoCam instrument, applying digital processing techniques to enhance color and clarity.
At the time the raw image was taken, the Juno spacecraft was about 18,000 miles (29,000 kilometers) above Jupiter’s cloud tops, at a latitude of about 68 degrees north of the equator.
JunoCam’s raw images are available for the public to peruse and process into image products at https://missionjuno.swri.edu/junocam/processing. More information about NASA citizen science can be found at https://science.nasa.gov/citizenscience and https://www.nasa.gov/solve/opportunities/citizenscience.
More information about Juno is at https://www.nasa.gov/juno and https://missionjuno.swri.edu. For more about this finding and other science results, see https://www.missionjuno.swri.edu/science-findings.
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By NASA
3 min read
Preparations for Next Moonwalk Simulations Underway (and Underwater)
Credit: NASA/Ryan Fitzgibbons What do you give to an ocean that has everything? This year, for National Ocean Month, NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) satellite— is gifting us a unique look at our home planet. The visualizations created with data from the satellite, which launched on Feb. 8, are already enhancing the ways that we view our seas and skies.
The PACE satellite views our entire planet every day, returning data at a cadence that allows scientists to track and monitor the rapidly changing atmosphere and ocean, including cloud formation, aerosol movement, and differences in microscopic ocean life over time.
The visualization starts with a view of swaths of Earth from PACE’s Ocean Color Instrument. The Ocean Color Instrument observes Earth in ultraviolet, visible, and near infrared light — over 200 wavelengths. With this level of detail, scientists can now, from space, regularly identify specific communities of phytoplankton — tiny organisms floating near the surface of the ocean that serve as the center of the marine food web. This is a major advance, as different types of phytoplankton play different roles in ocean ecosystems and health.
PACE orbits Earth in this visualization, exposing a swath of true color imagery. NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio Zooming in, the visualization shows the ecosystems and surrounding atmosphere off the United States’ East Coast and The Bahamas on March 21. Like previous satellites, the Ocean Color Instrument can detect chlorophyll in the ocean, which indicates the presence and abundance of phytoplankton. The Ocean Color Instrument adds to this by allowing scientists to determine the types of phytoplankton present, such as the three different types of phytoplankton identified in the visualization.
False color data visualization of phytoplankton (Picoeukaryotes and Prochlorococcus), as observed by PACE’s Ocean Color instrument (OCI).NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio The portion of the swirls in green indicate the presence of picoeukaryotes, organisms which are smaller than 0.3 micrometers in size — 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair. In light blue are prochlorococcus, the smallest known organism to turn sunlight into energy (photosynthesis); they account for a major fraction of all photosynthesis that occurs in the ocean. The portion of the bloom in bright pink indicates synechococcus, a phytoplankton group that can color the water light pink when many are present in a small area.
False color data visualization of phytoplankton (Picoeukaryotes and Synechococcus), as observed by PACE’s OCI instrument. NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio These are just three of the thousands of types of phytoplankton, and just the start of what the Ocean Color Instrument will be able to identify.
The PACE satellite’s two polarimeters, Hyper-Angular Rainbow Polarimeter #2 (HARP2) and Spectro-polarimeter for Planetary Exploration one (SPEXone), provide a unique view of Earth’s atmosphere, helping scientists learn more about clouds and small particles called aerosols. The polarimeters measure light that reflects off of these particles. By learning more about the interactions between clouds and aerosols, these data will ultimately help make climate models more accurate. Additionally, aerosols can degrade air quality, so monitoring their properties and movement is important for human health.
Aerosols, as observed by PACE’s HARP2 and SPEXone instruments.NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio In the visualization, the large swath of HARP2 data shows the concentration of aerosols in the air for that particular day. These data — a measure of the light scattering and absorbing properties of aerosols — help scientists not only locate the aerosols, but identify the type. Near the coast, the aerosols are most likely smoke from fires in the U.S. southeast. Adding detail to the visualization and the science, the thin swath of SPEXone data furthers the information by showing the aerosol particle size.
Over the next year, PACE scientists aim to create the first global maps of phytoplankton communities and glean new insights into how fisheries and aquatic resources are responding to Earth’s changing climate.
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NASA’s Plankton, Aerosol, Cloud, ocean Ecosystem (PACE) spacecraft was specifically designed to study the invisible universe of Earth’s sea and sky from the vantage point of space. We’ve measured 4-6 colors of the rainbow for decades, which has enabled us to “see” phytoplankton from space through the lens of its primary photosynthetic pigment, chlorophyll-a. PACE’s primary instrument is the first of its kind to measure all the colors of the rainbow, every day, everywhere. That means we can identify the type of phytoplankton behind the chlorophyll-a. Different types of phytoplankton have different effects on the food web, on water management, and on the climate, via their impact on the carbon cycle.NASA's Scientific Visualization Studio By Erica McNamee
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
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Last Updated Jun 07, 2024 EditorKate D. RamsayerContactErica McNameeerica.s.mcnamee@nasa.govLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
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By NASA
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble Space Telescope have united to study an expansive galaxy cluster known as MACS0416. The resulting panchromatic image combines visible and infrared light to assemble one of the most comprehensive views of the universe ever taken. Located about 4.3 billion light-years from Earth, MACS0416 is a pair of colliding galaxy clusters that will eventually combine to form an even bigger cluster.
Image: Galaxy Cluster MACS0416
This panchromatic view of galaxy cluster MACS0416 was created by combining infrared observations from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope with visible-light data from NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The resulting wavelength coverage, from 0.4 to 5 microns, reveals a vivid landscape of galaxies whose colors give clues to galaxy distances: The bluest galaxies are relatively nearby and often show intense star formation, as best detected by Hubble, while the redder galaxies tend to be more distant, or else contain copious amount of dust, as detected by Webb. The image reveals a wealth of details that are only possible to capture by combining the power of both space telescopes. In this image, blue represents data at wavelengths of 0.435 and 0.606 microns (Hubble filters F435W and F606W); cyan is 0.814, 0.9, and 1.05 microns (Hubble filters F814W, and F105W and Webb filter F090W); green is 1.15, 1.25, 1.4, 1.5, and 1.6 microns (Hubble filters F125W, F140W, and F160W, and Webb filters F115W and F150W); yellow is 2.00 and 2.77 microns (Webb filters F200W, and F277W); orange is 3.56 microns (Webb filter F356W); and red represents data at 4.1 and 4.44 microns (Webb filters F410M and F444W). NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Diego (Instituto de Física de Cantabria, Spain), J. D’Silva (U. Western Australia), A. Koekemoer (STScI), J. Summers & R. Windhorst (ASU), and H. Yan (U. Missouri). The image reveals a wealth of details that are only possible to capture by combining the power of both space telescopes. It includes a bounty of galaxies outside the cluster and a sprinkling of sources that vary over time, likely due to gravitational lensing – the distortion and amplification of light from distant background sources.
This cluster was the first of a set of unprecedented, super-deep views of the universe from an ambitious, collaborative Hubble program called the Frontier Fields, inaugurated in 2014. Hubble pioneered the search for some of the intrinsically faintest and youngest galaxies ever detected. Webb’s infrared view significantly bolsters this deep look by going even farther into the early universe with its infrared vision.
“We are building on Hubble’s legacy by pushing to greater distances and fainter objects,” said Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University, principal investigator of the PEARLS program (Prime Extragalactic Areas for Reionization and Lensing Science), which took the Webb observations.
What the Colors Mean
To make the image, in general the shortest wavelengths of light were color-coded blue, the longest wavelengths red, and intermediate wavelengths green. The broad range of wavelengths, from 0.4 to 5 microns, yields a particularly vivid landscape of galaxies.
Those colors give clues to galaxy distances: The bluest galaxies are relatively nearby and often show intense star formation, as best detected by Hubble, while the redder galaxies tend to be more distant as detected by Webb. Some galaxies also appear very red because they contain copious amounts of cosmic dust that tends to absorb bluer colors of starlight.
“The whole picture doesn’t become clear until you combine Webb data with Hubble data,” said Windhorst.
Image: Side-by-side Hubble/Webb
This side-by-side comparison of galaxy cluster MACS0416 as seen by the Hubble Space Telescope in optical light (left) and the James Webb Space Telescope in infrared light (right) reveals different details. Both images feature hundreds of galaxies, however the Webb image shows galaxies that are invisible or only barely visible in the Hubble image. This is because Webb’s infrared vision can detect galaxies too distant or dusty for Hubble to see. (Light from distant galaxies is redshifted due to the expansion of the universe.) The total exposure time for Webb was about 22 hours, compared to 122 hours of exposure time for the Hubble image.NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster
While the new Webb observations contribute to this aesthetic view, they were taken for a specific scientific purpose. The research team combined their three epochs of observations, each taken weeks apart, with a fourth epoch from the CANUCS (CAnadian NIRISS Unbiased Cluster Survey) research team. The goal was to search for objects varying in observed brightness over time, known as transients.
They identified 14 such transients across the field of view. Twelve of those transients were located in three galaxies that are highly magnified by gravitational lensing, and are likely to be individual stars or multiple-star systems that are briefly very highly magnified. The remaining two transients are within more moderately magnified background galaxies and are likely to be supernovae.
“We’re calling MACS0416 the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster, both because it’s so colorful and because of these flickering lights we find within it. We can see transients everywhere,” said Haojing Yan of the University of Missouri in Columbia, lead author of one paper describing the scientific results.
Finding so many transients with observations spanning a relatively short time frame suggests that astronomers could find many additional transients in this cluster and others like it through regular monitoring with Webb.
A Kaiju Star
Among the transients the team identified, one stood out in particular. Located in a galaxy that existed about 3 billion years after the big bang, it is magnified by a factor of at least 4,000. The team nicknamed the star system “Mothra” in a nod to its “monster nature,” being both extremely bright and extremely magnified. It joins another lensed star the researchers previously identified that they nicknamed “Godzilla.” (Both Godzilla and Mothra are giant monsters known as kaiju in Japanese cinema.)
Interestingly, Mothra is also visible in the Hubble observations that were taken nine years previously. This is unusual, because a very specific alignment between the foreground galaxy cluster and the background star is needed to magnify a star so greatly. The mutual motions of the star and the cluster should have eventually eliminated that alignment.
Image: Gravitationally Lensed Galaxy
This image of galaxy cluster MACS0416 highlights one particular gravitationally lensed background galaxy, which existed about 3 billion years after the big bang. That galaxy contains a transient, or object that varies in observed brightness over time, that the science team nicknamed “Mothra.” Mothra is a star that is magnified by a factor of at least 4,000 times. The team believes that Mothra is magnified not only by the gravity of galaxy cluster MACS0416, but also by an object known as a “milli-lens” that likely weighs about as much as a globular star cluster.NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, J. Diego (Instituto de Física de Cantabria, Spain), J. D’Silva (U. Western Australia), A. Koekemoer (STScI), J. Summers & R. Windhorst (ASU), and H. Yan (U. Missouri). The most likely explanation is that there is an additional object within the foreground cluster that is adding more magnification. The team was able to constrain its mass to be between 10,000 and 1 million times the mass of our Sun. The exact nature of this so-called “milli-lens,” however, remains unknown.
“The most likely explanation is a globular star cluster that’s too faint for Webb to see directly,” stated Jose Diego of the Instituto de Física de Cantabria in Spain, lead author of the paper detailing the finding. “But we don’t know the true nature of this additional lens yet.”
The Yan et al. paper is accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal. The Diego et al. paper has been published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
The Webb data shown here was obtained as part of PEARLS GTO program 1176.
The James Webb Space Telescope is the world’s premier space science observatory. Webb is solving mysteries in our solar system, looking beyond to distant worlds around other stars, and probing the mysterious structures and origins of our universe and our place in it. Webb is an international program led by NASA with its partners, ESA (European Space Agency) and the Canadian Space Agency.
The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and ESA. NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, manages the telescope. The Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, Maryland, conducts Hubble and Webb science operations. STScI is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, in Washington, D.C.
Media Contacts
Laura Betz – laura.e.betz@nasa.gov, Claire Andreoli – claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, , Greenbelt, Md.
Hannah Braun – hbraun@stsci.edu , Christine Pulliam – cpulliam@stsci.edi
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
Downloads
Download full resolution images for this article from the Space Telescope Science Institute.
Research Results: the Yan et al. paper is accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
Research Results: the Diego et al. paper has been published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Related Information
Galaxies Basics – https://universe.nasa.gov/galaxies/basics/
Galaxies Evolution – https://universe.nasa.gov/galaxies/evolution/
Webb Mission Page – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/
Webb News – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/latestnews/
Webb Images – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/webb/multimedia/images/
Hubble Mission Page – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble
Hubble News – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/hubble-news/
Hubble Images – https://science.nasa.gov/mission/hubble/multimedia/hubble-images/
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