NASA's New Telescope 'Roman' Can Solve the Enigma That is Dark Matter, Researchers Claim

Dark matter may soon come into the grasp of researchers with the help of a state-of-the-art telescope. A team of researchers believes that the telescope could utilize a concept first presented by Albert Einstein to finally understand the nature of elusive dark matter, according to Space. The NASA telescope, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope (Roman), will be utilized for this purpose. Experts revealed their plans for this objective in a study published in The Astrophysical Journal. Roman will start operations in 2027, per the plans. The phenomenon that the telescope would use to detect black matter is "gravitational lensing," first proposed by Einstein in 1916. 

Gravitational lensing is rooted in Einstein's gravitational theory, which suggests that objects with great mass distort the space-time fabric, and when light passes through them, it gets curved. This curving is essentially gravitational lensing, which is possibly facilitated by many bodies in space. The area that would supposedly be focused on by Roman could include around 160,000 gravitational lenses. Researchers believe 500 of these lenses will have dark matter, which could then be further investigated. Dark matter constitutes around 85% of the matter in the universe, but unlike other matter, it is not supposedly composed of electrons, protons, and neutrons. Observations made by Roman could shed light on this well-hidden secret.

Past examinations have shown that gravitational lensing and dark matter are linked to each other, stated NASA. According to experts, dark matter is the mass in the galaxy that cannot emit, reflect, or absorb light. Since it is not visible, insights available about it are also less from experts. Gravitational lensing is facilitated by mass, and hence, dark matter, being a kind of mass, can also produce this phenomenon. Roman focusing on these events in space could help researchers to understand more about the mysterious dark matter. Gravitational lensing in space typically involves multiple cosmic objects. Astronomers have observed instances of this phenomenon in a single foreground galaxy and a background galaxy.

The foreground galaxy seemingly warps the space-time fabric, which then leads to the curving of light from the background galaxy across more than one path. This occurrence also causes the foreground galaxy to act like a lens, magnifying a galaxy placed right behind it. Most of the gravitational lensing observations undertaken by astronomers have been due to the interaction between a foreground and background galaxy. For experts, the gravitational lensing in this scenario appears as warped arcs and crescents. 

Bryce Wedig, a graduate student at Washington University in St. Louis and lead author of the study, claims that the current sample size of gravitational lenses is small because two galaxies need to perfectly line up for the light bending to become visible. Present telescopes are either not precise enough to detect these events or have a smaller field of view.  The images produced by Roman will be 200 times larger than the ones captured by the Hubble Space Telescope, according to Space. It will bring into focus more gravitational lenses than ever before. Along with quantity, the quality of the images will also help researchers in detecting and analyzing dark matter.

"Roman will not only significantly increase our sample size [of gravitational lenses] — its sharp, high-resolution images will also allow us to discover gravitational lenses that appear smaller on the sky," Tansu Daylan, a faculty fellow at the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis and research team principal investigator, shared. "Ultimately, both the alignment and the brightness of the background galaxies need to meet a certain threshold so we can characterize the dark matter within the foreground galaxies."

Roman's 300-megapixel camera can supposedly detect the bending of background galaxies' light with a precision of 50 milliarcseconds. This precision can aid experts in searching the places where light undergoes the least amount of bending. The detection is essential as light distortions are directly proportional to the involved mass. If the light distortion is low, then the possible dark matter associated with it could also be small. The clumps of dark matter like these are what came together to form the early universe. "Finding gravitational lenses and being able to detect clumps of dark matter in them is a game of tiny odds. With Roman, we can cast a wide net and expect to get lucky often," Wedig added. "With Roman, we can cast a wide net and expect to get lucky often. We won't see dark matter in the images — it's invisible — but we can measure its effects."