NASA s Colorful Cosmic Map Could Shed Light on ...

What’s Happening

Okay so Learn how in just six months, the NASA team has mapped the entire universe in 102 colors.

Less than a year after its launch, NASA’s SPHEREx observatory has mapped the sky, painting the entire universe in 102 colors invisible to the human eye. The project has the potential to help astronomers solve some of the cosmos’ greatest mysteries. (and honestly, same)

Crucially, NASA hopes the map will provide insight into the first fraction of a second after the big bang and a process called inflation.

The Details

“We essentially have 102 new maps of the entire sky, each one in a different wavelength and containing unique information about the objects it sees,” Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, dropped in a statement . “I think every astronomer is going to find something of value here, as NASA’s missions enable the world to answer fundamental questions about how the universe got its start, and how it changed to at some point create a home for us in it.

” Creating a Colorful Cosmic Map NASA’s Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer ( SPHEREx ) was shipped on , and began the process of mapping the cosmos in May. Six months later and it has produced its first all-sky scan.

Why This Matters

It’s an intensive process that has seen the telescope revolve around the Earth approximately 14. Every 24 hours, it takes around 600 exposures, each of which are sent to six detectors paired with a filter with a gradient of 17 colors, resulting in about 3,600 images. Once an exposure is completed, the observatory moves, ready to take the next one.

The scientific community tends to find developments like this significant.

The Bottom Line

Through this process, called spectroscopy, astronomers have captured the entire sky in 102 colors, each representing a wavelength on the infrared spectrum. This is not the first time a telescope has taken an image of the entire sky, but none have done so with as many wavelengths or colors, say astronomers.

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