NASA launched the SPHEREx Space Observatory this year on March 25 — and the first results are in. The orange-hued image was taken at an infrared wavelength of 3.29 micrometers, capturing a cloud of molecules similar to smoke or soot. The blue-toned image is of the same portion of the sky, but was taken at a wavelength of 0.98 micrometers; when viewed at this wavelength — or band — the smoky dust cloud is completely camouflaged.
These are only two of the 102 infrared bands in which SPHEREx can observe — one feature that sets it apart from all other all-sky surveys.
SPHEREx stands for the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer. It carries both a spectrometer (an instrument that separates light into a range of wavelengths) and a photometer (an instrument that measures the intensity of electromagnetic radiation in several wavelengths). Throughout its two-year mission, the observatory will conduct an all-sky survey with highly sensitive detectors collecting light emitted by hundreds of millions of galaxies and over 100 million stars in our home galaxy. Starting on May 1, SPHEREx is scheduled to take roughly 3,600 images daily as it circles Earth in a polar orbit, from the North to the South Pole, pointing outward, away from the Earth and the Sun.
From these two years of observations, scientists will compile four surveys, which should contribute to understanding the origins of the universe, galaxies, and contents of the Milky Way. Studying the distribution of galaxies and the large-scale structure of the universe will yield information about what happened in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang, during an event called cosmic inflation — when the universe expanded a trillion-trillionfold.
“We’re going to study what happened on the smallest size scales in the universe’s earliest moments by looking at the modern universe on the largest scales,” said SPHEREx’s project manager at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Jim Fanson, in a JPL press release. “I think there’s a poetic arc to that.” By combining this mission’s results with other surveys, astronomers hope to take a massive leap toward understanding the contents of our home galaxy but also the first milliseconds of the universe’s existence.
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