New simulated universe previews panoramas from NASA's Roman telescope

Astronomers have released a set of more than a million simulated images of the universe as NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Rome Space Telescope will see it. This preview will help scientists explore Roman's myriad scientific goals.

“We used supercomputers to create a synthetic universe and simulated its evolution over billions of years, tracing every photon from every cosmic object to “The entire path of the Roman probe.” Carolina led the simulation campaign. “This is the largest, deepest and most realistic comprehensive survey of the simulated universe today.”

The project, called OpenUniverse, relies on the now-retired Theta supercomputer at DOE (Department of Energy) Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois. The supercomputer completed a process that would have taken an ordinary computer more than 6,000 years in just 9 days.

In addition to Roman, the 400 terabyte data set will preview observations from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, and the ESA (European Space Agency) Euclid's approximate simulation mission, which With contributions from NASA. Roman data is now available here, with Rubin and Euclidean data coming soon.

The team used the most sophisticated existing models of the fundamental physics of the universe and derived information from existing galaxy catalogs and the performance of telescope instruments. The resulting simulated image spans 70 square degrees, equivalent to the sky area covered by more than 300 full moons. In addition to its vast scope, it also covers a vast time span—more than 12 billion years.

The project's vast space-time coverage shows scientists how the telescope will help them explore some of the universe's biggest mysteries. They will be able to study how dark energy (the mysterious force thought to be accelerating the expansion of the universe) and dark matter (invisible matter that can only be seen through its gravitational influence on regular matter) shape the universe and influence its destiny. Scientists will learn more about dark matter by studying its gravitational influence on visible matter. By studying 100 million synthetic galaxies in the simulation, they will learn how galaxies and galaxy clusters evolve over billions of years.

Repeated simulated observations of specific parts of the universe allowed the team to stitch together movies, revealing exploding stars crackling like fireworks across the synthetic universe. These starbursts allow scientists to map the expansion of the simulated universe.

Scientists are now using the OpenUniverse data as a test bed to create an alert system to notify astronomers when Roman sees such phenomena. The system will tag these events and track the light they produce so astronomers can study them.

That's important because Roman will be sending back too much data for scientists to comb through on their own. The team is developing machine learning algorithms to determine how best to filter all the data to find and distinguish cosmic phenomena, such as various types of exploding stars.

“The biggest difficulty is figuring out whether what you're seeing is a special type of supernova that we can use to map how the universe is expanding, or whether it's almost Something that is the same but does nothing to achieve this goal,” said a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California and a principal investigator at OpenUniverse.

While Euclid is already actively scanning the universe, Rubin will begin operations by the end of this year and Roman will launch in May 2027. Scientists can use the composite images to plan observations with upcoming telescopes and prepare to process their data. Because these telescopes will provide large amounts of data, preparation time is critical.

In terms of data volume, “Roman will disrupt everything that has been done before in space in terms of infrared and light wavelengths,” Troxel said. “For one of Roman's surveys, observations that would have taken the Hubble or James Webb Space Telescopes about a thousand years to complete took less than a year. The sheer number of objects that Roman has clearly delineated will bring to change.”

“We can expect that Roman's observations will yield a range of incredibly exciting, potentially Nobel Prize-winning scientific results,” Kiesling said. “The mission will reveal how the universe expands over time, make 3D maps of galaxies and galaxy clusters, reveal new details about star formation and evolution – all of which we simulate. So now we're starting to synthesize the data Do the exercises so that when the real observations begin we can engage directly with the science.”

After the Rome launch, astronomers will continue to play cosmic games using simulations to look for differences. Comparing real observations with synthetic observations will help scientists understand how accurately their simulations predict reality. Any discrepancies could suggest that physics in the universe are different than expected.

“If we see something that doesn't quite fit with the Standard Model of Cosmology, that's confirmation that we're actually seeing new physics and not just misunderstanding something in the data,” said cosmologist Katrin Heitmann. “Something that's going to be extremely important,” said Dr. Argonne, deputy director of the High Energy Physics Division who manages the supercomputer's time on the project. “Simulation is very useful for solving this problem.”

OpenUniverse, along with other simulation tools being developed by Roman's Science Operations and Science Support Center, will prepare astronomers to provide the large data sets Roman expects. The project brings together dozens of experts from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory, IPAC, and several U.S. universities, with the Rome Project Infrastructure Team, SLAC, and the Rubin LSST DESC (Dark Energy Science in Space and Time Collaborative Heritage Survey) to coordinate. The Theta supercomputer is operated by the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science User Facility.

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and is scientifically supported by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC, Baltimore Space Telescope So and a scientific team composed of scientists from different fields are involved in management. research institutions. Key industrial partners are BAE Systems, Inc., Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies, Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging, Thousand Oaks, California.

Download high-resolution videos and images from NASA Scientific Visualization Studio

Author: Ashley Balzer
NASA Goddard Space Flight CenterGreenbelt, MD.

Media contact information:

Claire Andreoli
NASA Goddard Space Flight CenterGreenbelt, MD.
301-286-1940