00:00So, the telescope was designed to probe cosmic evolution, the history of the expansion of the universe, and also designed
00:08to help do a census of exoplanets, planets around other stars in our galaxies.
00:14And so, both of those are basically helping us understand our cosmic context.
00:19How did we get here?
00:20Are we alone in the universe?
00:22So, we're worth looking in the infrared, which is a wavelength range you can't really do from the ground.
00:28And we should be able to find rare one in a million red objects, which then Hubble and Webb could
00:34follow up on.
00:36So, when we started working the mission, the community suggested that we add a one-month survey of our Milky
00:43Way.
00:43It will be the biggest catalog of astronomical objects anybody's ever produced, and it will help us understand how common
00:52are solar systems like our own.
00:53Also, it's going to give us time-lapse movies of stars orbiting the black hole at the center of our
01:00galaxy.
01:02So, what we study with the telescope is light that galaxies and stars give off, but they give us indirect
01:09means to tell us about how stars orbit their galaxies, and that has told us that dark matter is out
01:18there.
01:18It's just something that has gravity, but we can't sense directly, and we don't know what it is.
01:23And dark energy is basically something that's driving the expansion of the universe to accelerate, which no one expected when
01:29it was discovered 25 years ago.
01:31And so, we just call our lack of understanding by the name dark energy, and we're going to try and
01:38understand it using the surveys that Roman's going to do.
01:42So, it takes us about three months to commission the observatory and process the initial data we take, and so
01:49I would expect the first light to come out around the end of the calendar year, around New Year's.
01:54But we're not going to have the results of the surveys until the surveys are done, and it's a five
02:00-year mission, and so to answer those big questions is going to take longer.
02:32We'll see you next time.
02:34We'll see you next time.
