Moving toward Lagrange point L2 around a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth, NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is about to begin its study of our universe.

Launched on Aug. 30, the space telescope has already released its first images before its 300-megapixel camera is fully calibrated, capturing clusters of stars as blurry green rings. Once Roman's Wide Field Instrument is fully functional, the telescope should produce images as crisp as those from the Hubble Space Telescope but encompassing an area 100 times larger in each snap, NASA has stated. Experts hope to use these images to uncover more information about dark energy and possible habitable exoplanets.

With Roman's first test images now published, we asked our readers what they're most excited about with this new space telescope.

Over 270 readers responded, with the largest voting group, 57%, picking "Habitable exoplanets" as their response.

When talking about the possibility of life on other planets, one reader commented, "I'm sure the telescope will find plenty of new worlds outside our solar system, and a fair amount in habitable zones as well, but on if these planets have life of any sort I can't imagine any space telescope will [be] able to detect any signs."

Following behind this majority, 27% of readers chose "The possible source of dark energy." One reader reflected their interest in dark energy by writing, "Since dark matter and dark energy seem to make up most of our Universe, it seems imperative that we at least know SOMETHING about them. Except that they exist."

Another commenter echoed this statement, writing, "Dark energy and dark matter, according to our current knowledge, composes the majority of the mass of the Universe yet we are not really sure what they are and exactly what their influence is on our Universe. That is a huge gap in our knowledge base. It is not something that would be good to know, it is something we must know before we go where no man has gone before."

The smallest voting group, representing 9% of respondents, admitted, "I don't know, but I will use its pictures for my desktop wallpaper." If you fall into that group, we recommend checking out our Space Photo of the Week and Earth from Space series to get more image options for all your devices.

NASA's latest space telescope has officially taken its first photos of our universe. Launched on Aug. 30, the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope is on its way to Lagrange point L2, a "parking spot" in space about a million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth where it will begin scanning deep space.

Using its 300-megapixel camera, Roman captured hundreds of stars as green rings of light. The telescope's Wide Field Instrument hasn't been fully focused yet, which is why these balls of gas appear blurry in the debut test image. But once the instrument is calibrated over the next few months, it should produce images as clear as those taken by the Hubble Space Telescope — but which cover an area 100 times larger. Astronomers hope to use these images to help solve some of the biggest mysteries in our universe, including the possible source of dark energy and the search for alien life.

With Roman's first test images now available, what are you most excited about for the future of this space telescope? Answer in the poll below, and let us know your thoughts in the comments!

Imagine opening your eyes for the first time and seeing that the sky is full of green doughnuts.

This was the view that greeted NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which just activated its powerful, 300-megapixel infrared camera for the first time.

The telescope, which launched to space on Aug. 30, is partway through a months-long commissioning process, with NASA scientists testing and tuning each of the spacecraft's instruments as it undertakes a million-mile (1.6 million kilometers) journey to Lagrange point L2 — an orbital "parking spot" where the competing gravity of Earth and the sun will hold Roman in place, alongside the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) and other scientific spacecraft.

Roman's camera system, known as the Wide Field Instrument (WFI), hasn't been fully focused yet, so the stars look like lime-colored loops in this debut test image. But so far, all systems are working as they should, according to a NASA statement.

By the time Roman is ready to beam home its first full science images in early 2027, it will be capturing cosmic snapshots as crisp and detailed as those from the Hubble Space Telescope ‪—‬ but each of Roman's images will cover an area 100 times larger than Hubble's.

"After years of effort to build and test the instrument on the ground, we now have confirmation that it is operational in space. This is a huge milestone," Josh Schlieder, chief WFI scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in the statement. "There is much to do, but we are on our way to groundbreaking science."

The wavy rows of squares in the new image are key to Roman's photo-taking power. Each square represents one of Roman's 18 detectors, which translate photons from distant light sources into electrical signals that encode enormous images of the universe. Scientists are preparing for the telescope to beam roughly 1.4 terabytes of data — about five to 10 times the storage capacity of an average smartphone — back to Earth every day.

With all that data, NASA scientists expect Roman to push the frontiers of some of the biggest mysteries in astronomy. Planned long-term surveys of distant galaxies will help scientists discover new objects and calculate the expansion of the universe, potentially shedding new light on the phenomenon of dark energy.

The telescope will also contribute to the search for alien life. By selectively blocking out starlight with Roman's built-in coronagraph — another instrument that NASA successfully tested this week — the telescope will be able to zoom in on exoplanets with unprecedented precision, free from stellar glare. These observations could increase the number of known alien worlds from the current count of over 6,000 to more than 100,000 by the end of Roman's planned 10-year mission.

But in a final piece of good news, that 10-year mission now looks likely to double. According to NASA, a successful thruster burn (combined with bonus fuel loaded onto the spacecraft at launch) means that Roman may be looking at 22 years worth of power rather than 10. Like Hubble, which has continued operating far beyond its initial mission parameters, Roman may be an orbital gift that keeps giving for decades.

Are you a UFO fanatic? Find out with our extraterrestrials quiz!

NASA's next-generation cosmic observatory — the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope — is set to launch this weekend on a potentially decade-long mission to hunt for distant exoplanets, map out the Milky Way and unravel some of the universe's biggest mysteries, such as the true nature of dark matter.

The Roman telescope and its payload are scheduled to lift off aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket Sunday (Aug. 30) at 7:26 a.m. EDT from Launch Complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, according to NASA. A few hours later, the telescope will be released from the rocket's second stage and be exposed to the vacuum of space for the first time.

But even if everything goes according to plan, we will still have to wait a while to get a glimpse of Roman's first groundbreaking images.

As of Thursday morning (Aug. 27), the National Weather Service forecasts a 50% chance of thunderstorms at Kennedy Space Center Sunday, so weather could delay the launch. If that happens, a second launch window is available Monday (Aug. 31) at 7:22 a.m. EDT, when there is a reduced risk of thunderstorms.

You can watch the event on a SpaceX livestream and stay up to date with last-minute developments and postlaunch news via a live blog from Live Science's sister site Space.com.

What is the Roman Space Telescope?

The Roman Space Telescope is NASA's latest flagship observatory. It follows the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which launched in 2021, and the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been in orbit since 1990. Rather than replacing those spacecraft, Roman will work alongside them to help scientists scour the skies like never before.

The observatory is named after pioneering scientist Nancy Grace Roman, who served as NASA's first chief astronomer between 1960 and 1979. It is approximately 42 feet (12.7 meters) tall and 14 feet (4.4 m) wide and weighs around 18,000 pounds (8,000 kilograms) — about the same as a fully grown Tyrannosaurus rex, according to a NASA fact sheet.

Roman was fully completed in December 2025, almost a decade after construction began and within its initial $4.3 billion budget (less than half what JWST cost). Since then, it has been moved more than 900 miles (1,450 kilometers) from Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland and undergone a series of final checks in NASA's "clean rooms." Having initially been slated for a 2027 liftoff, the telescope is technically launching ahead of schedule.

Roman will eventually be stationed around 1 million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth at what scientists call a Lagrange point — a fixed point relative to our planet where the gravity of two objects cancels out. Its specific Lagrange point will be Sun-Earth L2, where JWST and the European Space Agency's Gaia and Euclid space telescopes already reside.

Roman's initial mission will last five years, but experts hope it could survive at least twice that long. Some space telescopes far outlast their initial missions; for example, Hubble is more than two decades past its original mission parameters, and NASA's recently doomed Swift Observatory lasted 10 times longer than predicted.

What makes Roman special?

Roman has two key instruments that set it apart from its predecessors. The first is its Wide Field Instrument, a 288-megapixel camera attached to a 7.9-foot (2.4 meters) mirror, which gives it a field of view 100,000 times greater than Hubble's. It will also see the cosmos in infrared light, similar to JWST. These combined capabilities will allow Roman to observe the cosmos like never before.

But the telescope's secret weapon is arguably its coronagraph, which can block out the light from distant stars, allowing Roman to see fainter objects, such as the exoplanets that orbit these stars. Until now, scientists' main way of finding alien worlds was to wait for them to pass in front of, or transit, their home star, but Roman will be able to directly image exoplanets at almost any time in their orbital cycles. (Exoplanets remain out of view when they are directly behind their home stars.)

One of the biggest and most exciting claims researchers have made about Roman is that it could help reveal up to 100,000 exoplanets. Such discoveries would revolutionize how we study alien worlds, especially considering that we have uncovered over 6,000 exoplanets since the first one was spotted in 1992.

However, the telescope will also conduct long-term surveys that will help astronomers accurately map the Milky Way and find extremely distant galaxies, potentially helping scientists solve the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy that currently underpin a "cosmological crisis" surrounding the universe's expansion. And as with any new space telescope, scientists will likely find novel ways of using Roman once it is in operation.

"The mission will offer practically limitless opportunities for astronomers to conduct a broad range of additional science," NASA representatives wrote in the fact sheet. "From objects in our outer solar system and exploding stars to growing black holes and galaxies by the billions, very little will be beyond Roman's reach."

The spacecraft will beam roughly 1.4 terabytes of data — roughly 10 times the storage capacity of an average smartphone — to ground stations across Earth every day, according to the fact sheet.

When will we see Roman's first photos?

Roman's first snaps are arguably the most anticipated astronomical images since the debut photos from the ground-based Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which were released in June 2025.

But first, Roman has to travel to its Lagrange point, which is roughly four times farther away than the moon. This could take several weeks, although no exact timeline has been provided.

Once Roman is in position, there will be a roughly 90-day commissioning period, during which the telescope will fully power up its instruments and run a series of diagnostic tests to ensure everything is in order before its mission truly begins.

There is, therefore, a slim chance that we could see Rubin's first photos before the end of the year. However, NASA officials have tentatively predicted that the telescope will start snapping the stars in early 2027. It took JWST about seven months postlaunch to send its first full-color image to Earth.

NASA representatives have promised that "data from all of Roman's surveys will be made public as soon as it is processed, with no periods of exclusive access," so once the images are ready, everyone will be able to see them.

A deep-space telescope on a grand mission to make the largest-ever 3D map of the universe just peered into the star-filled heart of the Milky Way. In the new observations, shared Wednesday (June 24), the Euclid space telescope imaged the center of the Milky Way in extraordinary detail, showing off more than 60 million stars crowded in the galaxy's center.

The shiny new image from the European Space Agency (ESA) spacecraft will help astronomers confirm newfound exoplanets and use changes in starlight to measure those planets' masses as they orbit their parent stars, according to ESA scientists.

The image was taken in 26 cumulative hours in March 2025, across nine pointings of the telescope's visible-light camera toward the galaxy's center, also called the galactic bulge. Each viewpoint captured a slice of sky larger than the full moon. In a statement, ESA praised the performance of Euclid under challenging conditions.

"Designed to observe billions of faraway galaxies, the space telescope's visible-light camera is sensitive enough to tell apart individual stars in our super-crowded galactic bulge, without being blinded," agency officials wrote.

The mosaic image will help NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Telescope with its upcoming planet-hunting mission, after that observatory launches aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida no earlier than Aug. 30.

One way the Roman telescope will search for new worlds is through microlensing, the same technique that can be used to examine exoplanets in the new Euclid image. Microlensing happens when one star passes in front of another from the perspective of an observer. The gravity of the closer-up star briefly bends and magnifies the light of the star behind it, allowing possibly unseen planets to pop up near that star.

"During the last 20 years, almost 300 exoplanets have been discovered using this technique, all with ground-based telescopes and all towards the centre of our galaxy," Jean-Philippe Beaulieu, who initiated the Euclid galactic bulge survey and co-led the Euclid Consortium's exoplanet working group, said in the ESA statement.

"This image from Euclid includes 51 known planetary systems ‪—‬ and it will assist in studying many more that will be found," added Beaulieu, who holds positions at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics and the University of Tasmania in Australia.

A cosmic time capsule

Euclid's observing window was too short to find a microlensing event, which requires more than 20 days of examining one star to watch for a planet's orbit and associated changes in the star's light. But Euclid's work did allow astronomers to measure already-known planets. And once newer planets are confirmed by other telescopes, the image will let astronomers look back to confirm those newfound worlds' masses.

"In 24 hours, Euclid has already captured the stars involved in all the future microlensing events that the Roman space telescope will detect, but before the stars and planets involved have aligned," Natalia Rektsini, a postdoctoral fellow at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics who led the release of Euclid's galactic bulge survey data, explained in the statement.

"Anyone who detects a microlensing event in the same region, for example with Roman, will be able from now on to use Euclid data as a time reference in the past and see how the stars looked before they overlapped," she added. "Since Euclid can clearly separate individual stars, one can then measure how fast they move over time, and use that information to confirm the existence of a planet and determine its mass. This would not be possible with data from one point in time."

How well do you know our home galaxy? Find out with our Milky Way quiz!

Colossal monsters lurk in the centers of all galaxies. Known as supermassive black holes, these gravitational beasts can have millions to billions of times more mass than the sun.

For decades, astronomers have wondered where these behemoths came from and how they got so huge. Early on, physicists thought that supermassive black holes formed like other, smaller black holes do — with large stars collapsing and becoming sun-size black holes that slowly devoured surrounding matter and merged with one another over billions of years.

But it has become increasingly clear this model is broken.

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has peered back to some of the earliest epochs in cosmic history to spot gigantic black holes that are too big, too early to be explained by traditional models. Researchers are beginning to piece together a story of how they originated, which likely involved strange and exotic processes.

Emerging research suggests enormous black holes could have existed since the universe's earliest days, perhaps even before stars and galaxies, and that they came about in multiple ways. While future discoveries will help narrow down the predominance of each formation mechanism, many in the field are already thrilled to be chipping away at a long-standing cosmic mystery.

"This is one of the most exciting phases of my career," Roberto Maiolino, an astrophysicist at the University of Cambridge, told Live Science. "I'm tempted to call it a real revolution in our understanding of the formation of these objects."

Mystery giants

Hints of the cosmic size discrepancy arose in the early 2000s, when instruments like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey helped capture data on tens of thousands of extremely bright objects called quasars in the faroff universe. These luminous entities are thought to be gargantuan black holes in the centers of galaxies. They feed on vast amounts of gas and dust, and then spew powerful radiation. The Sloan survey showed that many quasars existed when the universe was just 800 million years old — a fraction of its current 13.8 billion-year age. The existence of these behemoths, which have millions to billions of times the sun's mass, was a head-scratcher for cosmologists.

That's because a typical black hole arises when a huge star nears the end of its life and explodes as a fiery supernova. The core of the titanic star collapses into a superdense point from which nothing, including light, can escape. Such stellar-size black holes are generally around 10 to 100 times as massive as the sun. While these objects can become gravitationally attracted to one another and merge into ever larger black holes, there didn't appear to be enough time for such processes to build them up into quasar-scale territory at the earliest points in cosmic history.

"We knew that either they grow very fast or there had to be some other ways of forming them," astrophysicist Ignas Juodzbalis, also of the University of Cambridge, told Live Science.

The question was how. One leading theory posits that, in the past, ginormous clumps of gas and dust could collapse under their own weight, rapidly forming a black hole with perhaps 1,000 to 1 million times the sun's mass. These direct-collapse black holes, as they're called, would then grow by feeding on gas and dust and merging into the supermassive black holes seen in today's galactic centers.

Models predicted that as such black holes gorged, they would become extremely bright compared with their host galaxies, either matching or topping surrounding stars' luminosities. In other words, they would become quasars.

In 2023, JWST spotted a distant galaxy, dubbed UHZ1, that seemed to align neatly with the direct-collapse black hole model. The galaxy existed when the universe was a mere 470 million years old and contains a black hole with an estimated mass of 40 million suns.

Astronomers lucked out because UHZ1 was spotted both by JWST, which sees in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and by NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, which sees in X-ray light. Infrared light mostly comes from stars and warm dust heated by starlight, whereas the more powerful X-rays blast out from the devouring black hole.

And UHZ1's infrared and X-ray brightness are quite similar to one another, which suggests a black hole so large that it rivals the mass of all the stars in its galaxy. (For comparison, a modern galaxy like our Milky Way has around 20,000 times more mass in its stars, gas and dust than in its central black hole.) No one had ever seen anything like this before.

But researchers had predicted exactly how the colors emitted by a direct-collapse black hole would appear in JWST's instruments, along with several other key properties that could identify such an object .

"It turns out that UHZ1 remarkably satisfies all these properties," Priyamvada Natarajan, an astrophysicist at Yale University and lead author of the paper making those predictions, told Live Science.

Little red dots

UHZ1 is not alone. From almost the moment it turned on, JWST has been detecting extremely compact red entities that existed mainly when the cosmos was between half a billion and 1.5 billion years old. Known as "little red dots," they were originally thought to be galaxies far too big to have formed in the early universe, leading some scientists to call them "universe breakers" for upending models of cosmic history. The prevailing consensus is now moving toward the possibility that, rather than unusually large galaxies, these are bizarre, humongous black holes.

For instance, an object called QSO1 that existed when the universe was around 700 million years old has been studied intensely since it was discovered in 2023. A recent investigation looked at gas swirling around QSO1's center to try to pin down its mass with high precision. Swirling gas travels at a certain speed depending on the gravitational force tugging it as it spins. Using this technique, astronomers have shown that QSO1's mass is around that of 50 million suns. Moreover, all of the mass appears to be in a compact region around the black hole, with very little evidence of a large stellar population.

"We still don't see where the host galaxy is," Lukas Furtak, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin, told Live Science. "There doesn't really seem to be one."

This prospect — a gigantic black hole with no visible host galaxy — has been conjectured but never previously observed. Yet that appears to be what many of these little red dots are. Another recent study analyzed an object named "The Cliff," which likely weighs billions of times as much as the sun and is from about 1.8 billion years after the Big Bang. JWST's data showed a very sharp jump in The Cliff's light at a narrow wavelength that usually arises from dense hydrogen gas at a specific temperature. The findings indicate that The Cliff might be a long-hypothesized object called a quasi-star or a black hole star.

A quasi-star would be a potential stage in the evolution of a direct-collapse black hole. After the central huge chunk of gas crumpled to form a black hole, an outer sphere of gas and dust would remain, get heated by the black hole's emissions and glow in red wavelengths. This entity would look somewhat like a giant red star but would in fact be an envelope of hot hydrogen gas cocooned around a supermassive black hole.

In the very beginning

While direct-collapse models can explain a lot of what JWST is seeing, there remain a few other possibilities for supermassive black hole formation.

First proposed by Stephen Hawking in the 1970s, primordial black holes are a class of objects that could have arisen in the first few moments after the Big Bang, when dense regions collapsed under their own weight. Such black holes could come in a wide range of sizes, including ones large enough to act as the initial seeds for later supermassive black holes. One study has shown that mergers of primordial black holes could explain GN-z11, a galaxy from when the universe was a mere 400 million years old that contains a black hole with an estimated mass of 2 million suns.

Another theory has posited the existence of "not-quite-primordial black holes ." These would have come about within the first few million years after the Big Bang — later than primordial black holes but still long before any stars — when large clouds of hydrogen and helium collapsed under their own weight.

"For primordial black holes, you need these really extremely dense regions in the very early universe," Wenzer Qin, a theoretical physicist at New York University, told Live Science. That generally requires a lot of fine-tuning of parameters in a cosmological model, she added. When you relax such tight constraints a bit, dense regions appear at slightly later times in cosmic history, creating direct-collapse black holes that can go on to merge and end up as supermassive black holes.

Astronomers think that almost all elements heavier than hydrogen and helium were created in the nuclear bellies of giant stars and were then strewn about the universe when those stars went supernova. Many of the early black holes and young galaxies that JWST is seeing contain low amounts of these heavy elements. That could suggest that at least some of these objects formed from either primordial or not-quite-primordial black holes, given that both would have arisen long before any stars existed.

Researchers are still debating which of these models might be dominant for monster-black-hole formation, but most favor a blended view.

"I think, in the end, it will be some combination of all these mechanisms that gives rise to the entire population of supermassive black holes," Qin said.

Other missions such as the European Space Agency's Euclid observatory, launched in 2023, and NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, expected to launch in 2027, will team up with JWST to discover and study more early supermassive black holes. That should help researchers differentiate between these formation mechanisms and determine which, if any, is more common.

One thing that appears to be growing clearer to many astronomers is that supermassive black holes in the centers of galaxies probably didn't come from stellar-size ones.

Thanks to its unparalleled abilities, JWST has upended our understanding of early cosmic history and is helping to rewrite the story of how gigantic black holes may have developed.

"The universe is littered with supermassive black holes that form extremely early," Natarajan said. "I can't tell you how exciting that is."

NASA recently revealed the first pictures of its newly constructed Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which could soon help researchers hunt for exoplanets, map the Milky Way and unravel some of the universe's biggest mysteries, such as the true nature of dark matter.

Experts have also revealed the most probable launch date for the next-generation spacecraft, confirming that it will likely lift off ahead of schedule — and could begin collecting data before the end of 2026.

Roman is NASA's next flagship space telescope, following on from the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990, and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), which launched in 2021. The orbital observatory is named after pioneering scientist Nancy Grace Roman — who served as NASA's first chief astronomer between 1960 and 1962 — and will work alongside Hubble and JWST, rather than replacing the existing telescopes.

New photos, released Dec. 4, show Roman standing upright in a clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The telescope is around 42 feet (12.7 meters) tall and weighs a hefty 9,184 pounds (4,166 kilograms). It began construction in February 2016, and the project has so far stayed within its initial budget of $4.3 billion, researchers say.

Once launched, Roman will be positioned around 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth at a Lagrange point — a fixed point relative to our planet where the gravity of two objects cancels out. Its specific Lagrange point will be Sun-Earth L2, where JWST and the European Space Agency's Gaia and Euclid space telescopes already reside.

"Completing the Roman observatory brings us to a defining moment for the agency," NASA Associate Administrator Amit Kshatriya said in a statement. "Transformative science depends on disciplined engineering, and this team has delivered — piece by piece, test by test — an observatory that will expand our understanding of the universe."

"With Roman's construction complete, we are poised at the brink of unfathomable scientific discovery," Julie McEnery, an astrophysicist at NASA Goddard and Roman's senior project scientist, said in the statement. "In the mission's first five years, it's expected to unveil more than 100,000 distant worlds, hundreds of millions of stars, and billions of galaxies."

What will Roman do?

Roman is equipped with two key instruments, which will define its objectives throughout its initial five-year mission. (Roman will likely remain operational beyond five years, but researchers have only planned what it will do until then.)

The first is the Wide Field Instrument (WFI), a 288-megapixel camera attached to a 7.9-foot (2.4 meters) mirror, capable of capturing high-definition photos of the outer solar system, the edges of the visible universe and anything in-between in infrared light too faint to be seen by human eyes.

One of Roman's main goals will be to create the most detailed map of the Milky Way's center yet in the Galactic Plane Survey, which will account for at least 25% of its total observing time. But it will also search the wider universe for things like distant galaxy clusters and giant "cosmic voids," which could help reveal the identity of dark matter and dark energy, NASA recently announced.

But the telescope's secret weapon is arguably its Coronograph Instrument, which will block out the light from distant stars, allowing WFI to snap photos of their surrounding exoplanets, which would normally be obscured by stellar glare.

As of September 2025, scientists have discovered more than 6,000 exoplanets in roughly 30 years. However, Roman is expected to find more than 15 times as many in half a decade, which would be a huge boon to scientists exploring the possibility of extraterrestrial life.

"The question of 'Are we alone?' is a big one, and it's an equally big task to build tools that can help us answer it," Feng Zhao, a researcher at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab in California and the Roman Coronagraph Instrument manager, said in the statement. This device could "bring us one step closer to that goal," Zhao added.

In total, Roman is expected to collect more than 20,000 terabytes of data over the course of its initial five-year mission, which is equivalent to the storage space of around 3,000 iPhones: "The sheer volume of the data Roman will return is mind-boggling," Dominic Benford, a NASA researcher and Roman's program scientist, said in the statement.

When will Roman launch?

For years, Roman's prospective launch has been earmarked for May 2027, with some predicting this date would be pushed back, like other previous NASA missions. For example, JWST was originally planned to launch in 2014, according to the Planetary Society.

However, early last year, rumors began to spread that Roman would not only meet its deadline but may actually launch early.

And on Jan. 5, at the 247th Meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Phoenix, Arizona, project scientists confirmed that these rumors were true, revealing that, as it stands, the earliest likely launch date for Roman is Sept. 28, according to Space News.

Roman will launch onboard one of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rockets from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, meaning it will need to be transported more than 900 miles (1,450 km) from Goddard before lift-off. This is scheduled to occur in June, and whether or not this happens on time will give us a better indication of how likely a September launch date really is.

Once Roman is in orbit, it will take approximately 90 days for mission scientists to carry out the necessary steps to start collecting data, according to NASA. Therefore, if the telescope does launch on Sept. 28, it will likely start collecting data around Dec. 27.

The age of exoplanets began in 1992, when astronomers detected a pair of planets orbiting a pulsar. Then, in 1995, astronomers discovered the first exoplanet orbiting a main sequence star. As NASA's Kepler and TESS missions got going, the number of confirmed exoplanets continued to rise.

By 2015, NASA announced that Kepler had discovered its 1000th exoplanet. 2016 was a banner year for exoplanet detections with nearly 1500 in that year alone. The total number reached 5000 in March of 2022. Now, NASA has announced that there are 6,000 confirmed exoplanets.

6,000 is a lot, though compared to the one hundred billion that may exist in the Milky Way, it's a tiny amount. Still, for a fledgling space-faring civilization like ours, it's something to celebrate.

The fact that we've found 6,000 is impressive, considering how challenging they are to detect. There are vast distances between us and other stars. Many exoplanets will be hidden in the glare from their stars, or they're so far from their stars that they're practically undetectable. With history as a guide, it's clear that technological advances will bring more of them within reach, barring the collapse of civilization or the abandonment of science.

Exoplanet science is, obviously, about more than sheer numbers. The variety of planets we've discovered teaches us vital things about nature, our own Solar System, and about the precious Earth. Curiously, many of the planets we've discovered are unlike anything in our own Solar System.

There are hot Jupiters, massive gas giants that orbit their stars in a matter of days. There are ultra-short period planets that put Mercury's short orbital period to shame by completing orbits in mere hours. One strange type of planet are so close to their stars that they're tidally locked to their star like the Moon is to Earth. These planets have one scorching hot side and one frigid side. Some of them may be hot enough to remain molten.

Others have such extreme temperatures, pressures, and chemical constituents that they may rain iron, or may be no denser than styrofoam. Some could be covered in oceans. Others swathed in toxic gases.

Somehow they're all part of nature. Determining how they came to be is an enduring fascination.

But at the base of all of this searching and wondering is the one big question: Are we alone?

"Each of the different types of planets we discover gives us information about the conditions under which planets can form and, ultimately, how common planets like Earth might be, and where we should be looking for them," said Dawn Gelino, head of NASA's Exoplanet Exploration Program (ExEP) at the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. "If we want to find out if we're alone in the universe, all of this knowledge is essential."

The vast majority of exoplanet detections are indirect. The transit method detects planets by measuring how much light an exoplanet blocks when it passes in front of its star. The radial velocity method detects the slight tugs exoplanets give to their stars and measure how the star's light changes by wobbling. Astrometry detects miniscule movements, and in gravitational lensing, the presence of a planet introduces anomalies into the observed light. Both Kepler and TESS used the transit method, and that method is responsible for most exoplanet detections with almost 4500. Radial velocity is next with about 1140 detections.

Though effective, they're indirect. Only direct imaging can measure the chemistry of exoplanet atmospheres and doesn't require particular orbital alignments or orientations. But it's difficult, and fewer than 100 exoplanets have been directly imaged.

6,000 confirmed exoplanets is a definite, concrete scientific milestone. But there are thousands of other candidates, and it takes a lot of work to confirm a candidate. Something else could be creating the signal, like stellar flaring or artifacts with the transit method. Follow up observations, sometimes with a different telescope, confirms them, and that takes a lot of time and observing resources. As of July 2025, TESS had a list of 7655 exoplanet candidates of which just over 600 have been confirmed.

"We really need the whole community working together if we want to maximize our investments in these missions that are churning out exoplanets candidates," said Aurora Kesseli, the deputy science lead for the NASA Exoplanet Archive at IPAC. "A big part of what we do at NExScI is build tools that help the community go out and turn candidate planets into confirmed planets."

We could be facing a glut of exoplanet discoveries that was unimaginable a couple of decades ago.

Candidate exoplanets are still being found in Gaia data, even though that mission ended. NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which should launch in 2027 unless the current administration's threats to cancel it come true, should discover thousands more through microlensing.

The age of exoplanets is beginning to shift, though. Our searches are becoming more targeted. Rather than casting a wide net and seeing what they catch, astronomers are seeking to find more specific types of exoplanets. ESA's PLATO is poised to detect many more rocky exoplanets around Sun-like stars after its launched in 2026. The Habitable Worlds Observatory is just a proposal at this point, but it will search for habitable exoplanets in habitable zones and will also contribute to the ballooning list of exoplanets. Other missions, like CHEOPS and ARIEL will study known exoplanets in greater detail.

The holy grail in exoplanet science is habitability. A lot goes into determining habitability, with only a few exoplanets displaying any possibility of being habitable. The key is finding biosignatures, particular chemicals that tell us life is active on a planet. The JWST with its infrared atmospheric spectrometry, is just beginning to address this and has already produced some tantalizing results, though nothing concrete yet.

Like all scientific endeavours, the search for exoplanets has been boosted by technological advances, and that will continue in the future. One of the big obstacles in exoplanet science concerns that stars that planets orbit. Stars are extraordinarily bright and the presence of a comparatively dim exoplanet can be entirely obfuscated by starlight. This is especially true in focused searchers for Earth-like worlds around Sun-like stars like the Habitable Worlds Observatory (HWO) is conceived to detect.

The HWO will need a powerful coronagraph or starshade to do its job. If a distant astronomer were searching for Earth around the Sun, they would have a tough time detecting it in all that starlight. That's effectively what astronomers will be doing with the HWO.

China is beginning to leverage its technological prowess in the exoplanet sphere, too. Its Earth 2.0 (ET) Space Telescope is set for launch in 2028 and will spend four years searching for exoplanet transits. It's China's first dedicated exoplanet-hunting mission and is focused on Earth-sized exoplanets.

Eventually, we will have a list of confirmed Earth-like exoplanets around Sun-like stars. Then we'll face an even more challenging task: figuring out if any of those worlds actually host life.

The original version of this article was published on Universe Today.

Astronomers have uncovered a new extreme in the universe's catalog of violent phenomena — a class of cosmic explosions so powerful that they rank among the most energetic events since the Big Bang.

These rare, ultra-luminous events were observed in the centers of three distant galaxies, where supermassive black holes lit up as they tore apart massive stars that strayed too close. Unlike typical stellar explosions, which brighten and fade within weeks after dramatic bursts of energy, these cosmic beacons took months to reach peak brightness and remained visible for years. Scientists have now classified these events as extreme nuclear transients (ENTs).

One such event, named Gaia18cdj, released as much energy in a year as 100 suns would emit over their entire lifetimes.

"Off the bat, there was an indication that we were looking at something pretty extreme in terms of the energy," Jason Hinkle, now an astronomer at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who identified the flares while sifting through data from the now-retired Gaia space telescope, told Live Science.

What makes ENTs stand out is not just their immense energy but also their longevity, Hinkle said. Their sustained brightness enables them to be seen across vast cosmic distances — much farther than typical stellar explosions — giving astronomers a rare opportunity to probe the distant, early universe.

"We're pushing the upper bounds of what we understand to be the most energetic environments of the universe," study co-author Anna Payne, a staff scientist at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Maryland, said in a NASA statement.

Related: Monster black hole M87 is spinning at 80% of the cosmic speed limit — and pulling in matter even faster

The events, described in a study published June 4 in the journal Science Advances, provide scientists with a powerful new tool to study the earliest, most distant black holes and how they evolved alongside their host galaxies.

A new class of cataclysm

In 2020, Hinkle noticed a couple of unusually bright and long-lasting flares while analyzing data from the Gaia telescope, which monitored the sky for changes in light from distant stars and galaxies. The two flares were originally recorded in 2016 and 2018.

Then, in 2023, a third, strikingly similar event was detected by the Zwicky Transient Facility, nicknamed "Barbie" or "Scary Barbie" for its catalog ID ZTF20abrbeie. The discovery helped confirm that these flares weren't isolated anomalies and instead represent a new class of powerful cosmic explosions, Hinkle said.

"It kind of all clicked together," he said. "There was this admittedly rare but very exciting class of extreme nuclear transients."

To pin down the identity of these mysterious outbursts, the researchers coordinated observations using a network of observatories, including NASA's now-retired NEOWISE asteroid hunter, which helped map the dust surrounding each black hole, offering clues about their environments.

Meanwhile, the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory helped confirm that these events weren't caused by supernovas or other known astrophysical processes, the study noted. The observatory's data showed that the outbursts emitted most of their energy in ultraviolet (UV) light, and the way the X-ray, UV, and optical light brightened and faded over time created a distinctive light curve. That pattern — like a cosmic fingerprint — matched what astronomers would expect from a black hole tearing a star apart, confirming that the outbursts were linked to supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.

Now, with three confirmed cases, astronomers hope to use the data as a guide for upcoming surveys to identify more flares that fit the ENT profile — and in doing so, uncover quiescent, distant black holes that would otherwise remain hidden.

One key mission that could help spot ENTs is NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, slated for launch in early 2027 — though its progress has been clouded by budget concerns. With its powerful infrared sensitivity, it could detect dozens of ENTs from more than 12 billion years ago. Additional discoveries are expected from ground-based observations from the Legacy Survey of Space and Time at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which will scan vast regions of the sky with unprecedented depth and resolution.

Hinkle suspects these upcoming surveys could not only catalog more ENTs but also uncover variations and diversity within this new class of cosmic explosions.

"Nature likes to be tricky," he said. "What is the periphery that we haven't actually explored yet?"

Large gaseous exoplanets could be filled with self-destructing dark matter. And now, a team of researchers has proposed using the soon-to-be-launched James Webb Space Telescope to scan distant behemoths in the galaxy for potential heating effects that could arise from the mysterious substance, which outweighs regular matter by almost 6 to 1 in the universe. 

Physicists know dark matter exists because it tugs gravitationally on stars and galaxies. But, so far, the invisible material has foiled every attempt to better understand its properties.

Many theories of dark matter propose that it is made of individual particles and that these particles can sometimes hit one another as well as regular matter particles, Juri Smirnov, an astroparticle physicist at The Ohio State University, told Live Science. According to these models, two dark matter particles might also smash together and annihilate each other, generating heat, he added. 

Related: The 11 biggest unanswered questions about dark matter

If those assumptions are true, dark matter particles should occasionally crash into large objects such as exoplanets, causing the particles to lose energy and accumulate inside those worlds. There, they could annihilate each other and produce a measurable heat signal that's visible from far away, Smirnov said. 

Along with his colleague Rebecca Leane, a postdoctoral researcher at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in Menlo Park, California, Smirnov has suggested using the space-based Webb telescope, which will scan the skies in the infrared part of the electromagnetic spectrum, to look for this characteristic heat signature. 

Larger exoplanets would accumulate more dark matter, so the best candidates for such searches would be gas giants bigger than Jupiter, or brown dwarfs — enormous worlds that nearly became stars but failed to gather enough gas to ignite nuclear fusion in their cores, the researchers wrote in a paper published April 22 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Determining that the heat is coming from dark matter annihilation and not some other process would be tricky, so Smirnov and Leane propose looking for exoplanets that have been flung away from their parent star and are quite old, meaning they will have cooled to very low temperatures. If such an object were glowing abnormally bright in the infrared, it could indicate the presence of dark matter. 

But an even more reliable method would be to search for large numbers of exoplanets throughout the Milky Way and make a map of their temperatures, Smirnov said. Dark matter is expected to pile up in the galactic center, so this map should show exoplanet temperatures rising slightly as you look closer to the Milky Way's core. 

No known astrophysical activity could account for such a signature. "If we see that, it has to be dark matter,” Smirnov said.

Capturing such a signal could help physicists determine the mass of dark matter particles and the rate at which they interact with regular matter. Since Webb, which is expected to be launched in October, will already be looking at exoplanets throughout the galaxy, Smirnov thinks the map of dark matter's potential heat signature could be made within four to five years.  

"It's a neat idea," Bruce Macintosh, an astronomer who studies exoplanets at Stanford University in California and was not involved in the work, told Live Science. Researchers have built enormous underground detectors on Earth to try capturing dark matter particles, but "there's a limit to how big a detector you can build as a human being," he added.

"We should take advantage of the big things nature provides," Macintosh said. 

His one quibble with the study was that Webb — which will do targeted, in-depth studies of relatively few objects — might not be the best telescope for the job. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which should launch in the mid-2020s, will map the entire sky in exquisite detail and might be better suited for this task, he added.

Originally published on Live Science.