102 "shades" of infrared: SPHEREx reveals the secrets of space

May 5,飞机盗号软件API破解技术 2025  21:00

NASA's SPHEREx space telescope has begun its ambitious two-year mission to map the entire sky in unprecedented detail, capturing approximately 3,600 images daily across 102 wavelengths of infrared light to create a comprehensive 3D map of hundreds of millions of galaxies and stars that will help scientists explore the origins of the universe, study galaxy evolution, and search for the ingredients of life in the Milky Way, Petapixelreports.

102 Infrared Wavelengths

SPHEREx's groundbreaking capability lies in its ability to observe the sky in 102 distinct wavelengths of infrared light, invisible to the human eye. This spectroscopic approach splits light into specific wavelengths, similar to how a prism creates a rainbow, allowing scientists to analyze cosmic sources with unprecedented detail. The telescope achieves this through six detectors, each equipped with 17 unique wavelength bands, with spectral resolving power of 41 between 0.75-3.8 μm and higher resolution (110-130) between 3.8-5 μm.

This spectral precision enables SPHEREx to determine both the composition of celestial objects and their distances, creating a true 3D map of the universe. The mission will capture the spectrum of every object in the 2MASS point source catalog to remarkable sensitivity levels and identify essential molecules like water and carbon dioxide in interstellar dust. By surveying in so many color bands, SPHEREx can reveal details about cosmic inflation after the Big Bang, measure the collective glow from distant galaxies, and locate hidden reservoirs of ingredients essential for life throughout our galaxy.

3D Galaxy Mapping

SPHEREx will create an unprecedented three-dimensional map of the cosmos by measuring the distances to hundreds of millions of galaxies through a phenomenon called redshift, where light from distant galaxies shifts to longer wavelengths due to the universe's expansion. Unlike previous sky surveys, SPHEREx employs low-resolution spectroscopy to efficiently capture large numbers of galaxy redshifts-hundreds of millions with lower accuracy and tens of millions with high accuracy. This approach complements other observatories like the James Webb Space Telescope, which studies individual galaxies in detail; SPHEREx instead treats galaxies as points in a vast cosmic web, with a field of view approximately 14,000 times larger than Webb's NIRCam instrument.

The resulting 3D map will serve multiple scientific purposes: detecting signatures of cosmic inflation in the early universe, studying how galaxy formation has evolved and slowed over cosmic time, and measuring the total infrared glow from all galaxies throughout history. By mapping galaxy positions across vast distances, scientists can analyze the large-scale structure of the universe to test inflation theories, which predict that the massive energy of the universe's earliest moments left subtle fingerprints that SPHEREx is designed to detect. The observatory will complete its full-sky survey every six months, ultimately producing four complete maps during its 25-month mission.

Cosmic Inflation Investigation

Cosmic inflation theory proposes that the universe expanded exponentially in the first fraction of a second after the Big Bang-a trillion-trillionfold expansion in less than a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second. SPHEREx will investigate this phenomenon by searching for non-Gaussian signatures in the distribution of galaxies, specifically measuring the fNL parameter that describes deviations from a perfect Gaussian distribution of quantum fluctuations. This measurement will help distinguish between competing inflation models: single-field inflation (which predicts small fNL values) and multi-field inflation (which predicts larger values).

The mission's approach is elegantly simple yet profound-by mapping the positions of millions of galaxies, SPHEREx will detect patterns that originated as quantum ripples during inflation and were later stretched to cosmic scales. These primordial fluctuations served as seeds for today's large-scale cosmic structures. SPHEREx will achieve sensitivity to fNL of at least 1 (2σ), reducing uncertainty by more than a factor of 10 compared to previous measurements. This precision could potentially rule out single-field inflation theories if evidence for multiple inflation fields is found, representing a significant advancement in our understanding of the universe's earliest moments.