00:00El Dr. Jason Kalirai, astrofísico del Laboratorio de Física Aplicada de John Hopkins, ha sido fundamental en el desarrollo del telescopio espacial Nancy Grace Roman,
00:12diseñado para estudiar la energía oscura y buscar exoplanetas mediante micro lentes gravitacionales.
00:20En esta nota comparte su visión sobre cómo la misión permitirá explorar fenómenos cósmicos antes inaccesibles
00:27y su impacto en el futuro de la astronomía.
00:33Telescopes generalmente vienen de dos diferentes flavors.
00:36Tienes muy poderosos, grandes telescopios, pero esos telescopios ven una pequeña parte del cielo.
00:41O, los telescopios son pequeños, así que no tienen ese poder, pero pueden ver grandes partes del cielo.
00:47WFIRST es el mejor de ambos mundos.
00:49WFIRST es el Telescópio de Infrareds Surveys.
00:52What I think of WFIRST as doing as building on what were the two great successes astronomically of the 1990s in the last decade,
01:00that is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Hubble Space Telescope.
01:04WFIRST is a NASA observatory that has the top ranking of the National Academy of Sciences to launch in the 2020s.
01:12It has the same image precision and power as the Hubble Space Telescope,
01:17but with 100 times the area of sky that it views.
01:20Looking at a large fraction of the sky
01:22allows you to get a more complete accounting.
01:24For example, the stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud,
01:26which is the nearest galaxy to us,
01:28or the stars in the galactic bulge.
01:30So you can do a much more complete accounting
01:32in a much shorter amount of time.
01:36The particular thing I'm interested in using WFIRST for
01:38is to actually do a statistical census
01:40of planetary systems in our galaxy.
01:42And what we're looking for
01:44is gravitational microlensing events.
01:46These are cases when another star
01:48passes in front of our line of sight
01:50to a background star.
01:52And it makes that background star get a little bit brighter
01:54due to the gravity of that foreground star.
01:56And that allows us to find planets.
01:58What WFIRST will do is we'll have
02:00what we call a coronagraph.
02:02A coronagraph lets us image and characterize
02:04really dim planets
02:06next to very bright stars.
02:08No matter how good a telescope
02:10that you build,
02:12it's always going to have some residual errors.
02:14This is going to be the first time
02:16we're going to fly an instrument that contains
02:18these high-format deformable mirrors.
02:20They're going to let us correct
02:21for errors in a telescope.
02:22That's never been done in space before.
02:24WFIRST will allow us
02:26to potentially make
02:28groundbreaking discoveries
02:30finding out what dark energy is.
02:32So this will tell us
02:34if dark energy is
02:36an unknown form of energy
02:38or if it's a modification of general relativity.
02:40Single WFIRST images will contain
02:43over a million galaxies.
02:45And we can't categorize and catalog
02:47those galaxies ourselves.
02:49Citizen Science allows interested people
02:52in the general public
02:53to solve scientific problems.
02:55And so one of the things
02:56that I'm really excited about
02:57is enabling this bridge
02:59where the general public
03:01can get involved in doing actual science.
03:04For me, it's a really exciting opportunity
03:07to play a significant role
03:09in a mission that I think will be
03:11one of the most powerful telescopes
03:13that we have in the 2020s
03:15and will be some of the most important things
03:18our country does in space
03:19in that timeframe.
