NASA — Love Letters from Space

On a jet black background, a bright spiral galaxy softly swirls with sprays of stars extending outward from a small, glowing yellow center. Another galaxy is beneath it and to the left, angling downward. This one is shaped almost like a pea pod with faded tendrils of stars extending from both ends. Together, the pair looks like a rose with the spiral galaxy forming the blossom and the elongated one forming the stem. A handful of large, bright stars speckle the background like sparkles. Credit: NASA, ESA, and G. Bacon, T. Borders, L. Frattare, Z. Levay, and F. Summers (Viz 3D team, STScI)

Love is in the air, and it’s out in space too! The universe is full of amazing chemistry, cosmic couples held together by gravitational attraction, and stars pulsing like beating hearts.

Celestial objects send out messages we can detect if we know how to listen for them. Our upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will help us scour the skies for all kinds of star-crossed signals.

On a backdrop speckled with tiny blue and yellow stars, an enormous heart-shaped nebula looms large. Clumps of dust and gas form intricate shapes, twisting around the edges of the “heart” and appearing to blow off the top in wisps so it almost appears to be on fire. The nebula is deep red and lit from within by a clump of bright blue-white stars. Credit: Brent Newton, used with permission

Celestial Conversation Hearts

Communication is key for any relationship – including our relationship with space. Different telescopes are tuned to pick up different messages from across the universe, and combining them helps us learn even more. Roman is designed to see some visible light – the type of light our eyes can see, featured in the photo above from a ground-based telescope – in addition to longer wavelengths, called infrared. That will help us peer through clouds of dust and across immense stretches of space.

Other telescopes can see different types of light, and some detectors can even help us study cosmic rays, ghostly neutrinos, and ripples in space called gravitational waves.

A complicated conglomeration of stars is intertwined on a black backdrop. Two regions glow pale yellow, one at the lower left of the screen and one at the upper right. Each is surrounded with twisted streams of stars which come together near the center of the frame, making the pair of galaxies look almost like a set of angel wings. The region at the center is dark and dusty, and the galaxies glow blue-white with clumps and speckles of bright pink stars. Credit: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble HeritageTeam (STScI/AURA)-ESA/Hubble Collaboration; Acknowledgment: B. Whitmore (Space Telescope Science Institute)

Intergalactic Hugs

This visible and near-infrared image from the Hubble Space Telescope captures two hearts locked in a cosmic embrace. Known as the Antennae Galaxies, this pair’s love burns bright. The two spiral galaxies are merging together, igniting the birth of brand new baby stars.

Stellar nurseries are often very dusty places, which can make it hard to tell what’s going on. But since Roman can peer through dust, it will help us see stars in their infancy. And Roman’s large view of space coupled with its sharp, deep imaging will help us study how galaxy mergers have evolved since the early universe.

A periodic table of elements titled “Origins of the Elements.” It features the typical boxes and atomic symbols as a usual periodic table, but with pictures inside each indicating how each element is typically forged. A legend at the top explains what each picture means: the big bang, dying low-mass stars, white dwarf supernovae, radioactive decay, cosmic ray collisions, dying high-mass stars, merging neutron stars, and human-made. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Cosmic Chemistry

Those stars are destined to create new chemistry, forging elements and scattering them into space as they live, die, and merge together. Roman will help us understand the cosmic era when stars first began forming. The mission will help scientists learn more about how elements were created and distributed throughout galaxies.

Did you know that U and I (uranium and iodine) were both made from merging neutron stars? Speaking of which…

An animation that begins with two glowing white orbs spinning around each other ever faster as they move closer together until they appear to join together. Ripples appear around each of them. When they merge, the animation shifts to a zoomed out view that shows an explosion where two fiery orange jets extend out from the center in opposite directions. At the end of each jet, a large, glowing pink ball extends outward and grows larger, so that the whole thing appears like a giant dumbbell. Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center/CI Lab

Fatal Attraction

When two neutron stars come together in a marriage of sorts, it creates some spectacular fireworks! While they start out as stellar sweethearts, these and some other types of cosmic couples are fated for devastating breakups.

When a white dwarf – the leftover core from a Sun-like star that ran out of fuel – steals material from its companion, it can throw everything off balance and lead to a cataclysmic explosion. Studying these outbursts, called type Ia supernovae, led to the discovery that the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Roman will scan the skies for these exploding stars to help us figure out what’s causing the expansion to accelerate – a mystery known as dark energy.

This animation starts with a dim view of the Milky Way, which angles across the screen from the upper left to lower right. A tiny dark ball at the left grows larger as it moves closer until it briefly takes up most of the screen before passing away again to the right. The view shifts to follow its path and we see it as a rotating planet with brownish stripes. As it moves away, the dark world fades into the background. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (Caltech-IPAC)

Going Solo

Plenty of things in our galaxy are single, including hundreds of millions of stellar-mass black holes and trillions of “rogue” planets. These objects are effectively invisible – dark objects lost in the inky void of space – but Roman will see them thanks to wrinkles in space-time.

Anything with mass warps the fabric of space-time. So when an intervening object nearly aligns with a background star from our vantage point, light from the star curves as it travels through the warped space-time around the nearer object. The object acts like a natural lens, focusing and amplifying the background star’s light.

Thanks to this observational effect, which makes stars appear to temporarily pulse brighter, Roman will reveal all kinds of things we’d never be able to see otherwise.

On a black background, a white outline in the shape of a blocky rainbow contains a picture of a dusty nebula. It’s mottled brown, green, and blue and speckled with glowing pink stars. Channels of dust twist and curl around the edges of the frame, and at the center a small white box contains a much sharper image of part of the nebula. At the top of the blocky rainbow-like outline, it says, “With you, I see the bigger picture,” and underneath it says, “Love, Roman.” Credit: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

Roman is nearly ready to set its sights on so many celestial spectacles. Follow along with the mission’s build progress in this interactive virtual tour of the observatory, and check out these space-themed Valentine’s Day cards.

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source: nasa.tumblr.com