More details: Visit websiteHeadlines:
This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:
It expanded so fast that in about a trillionth of a trillionth of a billionth of a second, a chunk of space the size of an atom would have exploded into a size far larger than our solar system. It brought our slice of the universe—everything we can see in the night sky —from an incomprehensibly small point to a size roughly between that of a human head and a city block.
But while the modern-day universe is riddled with evidence that this strange prolog to the universe that physicists call "inflation" probably happened, scientists still don't know exactly why it happened.
A new spacecraft from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge, launching as early as Tuesday evening on a SpaceX rocket out of Vandenberg Space Force Base near Lompoc, hopes to find out.
The mission—the Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer; or SPHEREx—will examine one of the clues inflation left behind. From its data, scientists hope to gain a better understanding of the culprit (or culprits) behind the rapid expansion.
Over the course of two years, SPHEREx will create four three-dimensional maps of the spread of galaxies throughout the entire sky, allowing scientists to search for the subatomic quantum ripples created by undiscovered inflation particles 13.8 billion years ago, now etched into the large-scale structure of the universe.
"It's zooming out to map the cosmos and see the largest structures and the biggest picture, unlike large telescopes like [the James Webb Space telescope] that will zoom in and take very detailed, exquisite pictures over specific small areas of the sky," said James Bock, Caltech physics professor, JPL senior research scientist and SPHEREx's principal investigator.
No comments:
Post a Comment