At the heart of our own galaxy, there is a dense thicket of stars with a supermassive black hole at the very center. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will provide the deepest-ever view of this zone, revealing stars, planets, and unique objects that resist definition.Based on the input of astronomers from across the globe, the Roman Space Telescope will spend three-quarters of its five-year primary mission conducting three revolutionary surveys of unprecedented scale. Their combined results will transform all areas of astronomy and answer longstanding questions about dark matter, dark energy, and planets outside of our solar system, called exoplanets.
That last theme will be addressed by the Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey, which will peer into the center of our galaxy to study the stars and exoplanets that make up the densely populated region around the center of the Milky Way, known as the galactic bulge.
The survey will observe six patches of the galactic bulge, one pinpointing the center and five nearby, every 12 minutes during 438 days of total observing time. The observations will be separated into six “seasons” spread out over five years.
Spending so much time focusing on a relatively small area of the sky, the mission will be able to track changes in the motion and light of hundreds of millions of stars, and any planets that orbit them, over long periods — the “time-domain” aspect of the survey.
“This survey will be the highest precision, highest cadence, longest continuous observing …