NewsNTech
The challenge of explaining dark matter, a substance that emits no electromagnetic signal and cannot be directly imaged, is the central scientific target NASA has assigned to its Roman Space Telescope, a $4.3 billion observatory.
The mission is also expected to discover thousands of planets beyond our solar system. Dark matter is thought to account for the majority of all matter in the universe.
It shapes the motion of galaxies and the clustering of large-scale cosmic structure through gravitational effects on visible matter, yet it has never been directly observed because it does not interact with light in any part of the electromagnetic spectrum.
What it is made of remains one of the fundamental open questions in physics. Roman is expected to advance that search. The exoplanet component is a census problem.
Keep reading