Hubble Maps 20 Million Bulge Stars Ahead of Roman's 2026 Exoplanet Hunt
Updated
Updated · Science@NASA · May 11
Hubble Maps 20 Million Bulge Stars Ahead of Roman's 2026 Exoplanet Hunt
3 articles · Updated · Science@NASA · May 11
A May 11 paper details a Hubble survey begun in spring 2025 to image much of the Milky Way bulge before NASA’s Roman telescope starts its core time-domain study, targeted for launch as early as September 2026.
Those earlier images let astronomers separate foreground lensing objects from background bulge stars, making Roman’s microlensing detections easier to interpret and turning mass-ratio estimates into direct star-and-planet mass measurements.
Roman’s survey will run through six 72-day observing seasons, taking snapshots every 12 minutes across about 1.7 square degrees—roughly 8.5 full moons—to search for thousands of exoplanets, rogue planets, neutron stars and Sun-mass black holes.
Hubble is expected to build a catalog of 20 million to 30 million point sources in the bulge, while Roman could expand that to about 200 million to 300 million and produce some of the deepest images ever taken of the region.
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The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope: Launching a New Era in Exoplanet Discovery, Dark Energy Research, and Open-Access Astronomy (2026–)
Overview
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is set to launch in early September 2026 aboard a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Anticipation is high because Roman’s design marks a monumental leap in space-based astronomy, combining Hubble-like sensitivity and resolution with a field of view 100 times larger. This allows Roman to map the sky 1,000 times faster than previous instruments, enabling efficient surveys of vast cosmic landscapes. With these capabilities, Roman promises to usher in an unprecedented era of astronomical discovery, fundamentally changing how we explore and understand the universe.