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An astronaut awakes | Cosmic Kiss
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By NASA
NASA/Steven Seipel On Sept. 2, 2022, NASA astronauts Anil Menon (left), Deniz Burnham (center), and Marcos Berrios (right) posed for a photograph in front of NASA’s Artemis I SLS (Space Launch System) and Orion spacecraft at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Burnham began her career as an intern at NASA’s Ames Research Center. She earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of California, San Diego, and a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
Burnham reported for duty in January 2022 to complete two years of initial astronaut training as a NASA astronaut candidate. Burnham, Menon, and Berrios astronaut candidates graduated in a ceremony on March 5, 2024. The graduates may be assigned to missions destined for the International Space Station, future commercial space stations, and Artemis campaign missions to the Moon in preparation for Mars.
Applications to become a NASA intern are currently open. Apply for Spring 2025 internships by Aug. 23, 2024.
Image credit: NASA/Steven Seipel
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By Space Force
Col. Nick Hague and his crewmates from the NASA SpaceX Crew-9 mission met with Airmen and Guardians to speak with and give thanks to representatives of military units who make manned spaceflight missions possible.
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By NASA
This artist’s concept shows how the universe might have looked when it was less than a billion years old, about 7 percent of its current age. Star formation voraciously consumed primordial hydrogen, churning out myriad stars at an unprecedented rate. NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will peer back to the universe’s early stages to understand how it transitioned from being opaque to the brilliant starscape we see today.NASA, ESA, and A. Schaller (for STScI) 0:00 / 0:00
Your browser does not support the audio element. Today, enormous stretches of space are crystal clear, but that wasn’t always the case. During its infancy, the universe was filled with a “fog” that made it opaque, cloaking the first stars and galaxies. NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will probe the universe’s subsequent transition to the brilliant starscape we see today –– an era known as cosmic dawn.
“Something very fundamental about the nature of the universe changed during this time,” said Michelle Thaller, an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. “Thanks to Roman’s large, sharp infrared view, we may finally figure out what happened during a critical cosmic turning point.”
Lights Out, Lights On
Shortly after its birth, the cosmos was a blistering sea of particles and radiation. As the universe expanded and cooled, positively charged protons were able to capture negatively charged electrons to form neutral atoms (mostly hydrogen, plus some helium). That was great news for the stars and galaxies the atoms would ultimately become, but bad news for light!
It likely took a long time for the gaseous hydrogen and helium to coalesce into stars, which then gravitated together to form the first galaxies. But even when stars began to shine, their light couldn’t travel very far before striking and being absorbed by neutral atoms. This period, known as the cosmic dark ages, lasted from around 380,000 to 200 million years after the big bang.
Then the fog slowly lifted as more and more neutral atoms broke apart over the next several hundred million years: a period called the cosmic dawn.
“We’re very curious about how the process happened,” said Aaron Yung, a Giacconi Fellow at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, who is helping plan Roman’s early universe observations. “Roman’s large, crisp view of deep space will help us weigh different explanations.”
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Your browser does not support the audio element. Prime Suspects
It could be that early galaxies may be largely to blame for the energetic light that broke up the neutral atoms. The first black holes may have played a role, too. Roman will look far and wide to examine both possible culprits.
“Roman will excel at finding the building blocks of cosmic structures like galaxy clusters that later form,” said Takahiro Morishita, an assistant scientist at Caltech/IPAC in Pasadena, California, who has studied cosmic dawn. “It will quickly identify the densest regions, where more ‘fog’ is being cleared, making Roman a key mission to probe early galaxy evolution and the cosmic dawn.”
The earliest stars were likely starkly different from modern ones. When gravity began pulling material together, the universe was very dense. Stars probably grew hundreds or thousands of times more massive than the Sun and emitted lots of high-energy radiation. Gravity huddled up the young stars to form galaxies, and their cumulative blasting may have once again stripped electrons from protons in bubbles of space around them.
“You could call it the party at the beginning of the universe,” Thaller said. “We’ve never seen the birth of the very first stars and galaxies, but it must have been spectacular!”
But these heavyweight stars were short-lived. Scientists think they quickly collapsed, leaving behind black holes –– objects with such extreme gravity that not even light can escape their clutches. Since the young universe was also smaller because it hadn’t been expanding very long, hordes of those black holes could have merged to form even bigger ones –– up to millions or even billions of times the Sun’s mass.
Supermassive black holes may have helped clear the hydrogen fog that permeated the early universe. Hot material swirling around black holes at the bright centers of active galaxies, called quasars, prior to falling in can generate extreme temperatures and send off huge, bright jets of intense radiation. The jets can extend for hundreds of thousands of light-years, ripping the electrons from any atom in their path.
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is also exploring cosmic dawn, using its narrower but deeper view to study the early universe. By coupling Webb’s observations with Roman’s, scientists will generate a much more complete picture of this era.
So far, Webb is finding more quasars than anticipated given their expected rarity and Webb’s small field of view. Roman’s zoomed-out view will help astronomers understand what’s going on by seeing how common quasars truly are, likely finding tens of thousands compared to the handful Webb may find.
This view from the James Webb Space Telescope contains more than 20,000 galaxies. Researchers analyzed 117 galaxies that all existed approximately 900 million years after the big bang. They focused on 59 galaxies that lie in front of quasar J0100+2802, an active supermassive black hole that acts like a beacon, located at the center of the image above appearing tiny and pink with six prominent diffraction spikes. The team studied both the galaxies themselves and the illuminated gas surrounding them, which was lit up by the quasar’s bright light. The observation sheds light on how early galaxies cleared the “fog” around them, eventually leading to today’s clear and expansive views.NASA, ESA, CSA, Simon Lilly (ETH Zürich), Daichi Kashino (Nagoya University), Jorryt Matthee (ETH Zürich), Christina Eilers (MIT), Rob Simcoe (MIT), Rongmon Bordoloi (NCSU), Ruari Mackenzie (ETH Zürich); Image Processing: Alyssa Pagan (STScI), Ruari Macken “With a stronger statistical sample, astronomers will be able to test a wide range of theories inspired by Webb observations,” Yung said.
Peering back into the universe’s first few hundred million years with Roman’s wide-eyed view will also help scientists determine whether a certain type of galaxy (such as more massive ones) played a larger role in clearing the fog.
“It could be that young galaxies kicked off the process, and then quasars finished the job,” Yung said. Seeing the size of the bubbles carved out of the fog will give scientists a major clue. “Galaxies would create huge clusters of bubbles around them, while quasars would create large, spherical ones. We need a big field of view like Roman’s to measure their extent, since in either case they’re likely up to millions of light-years wide –– often larger than Webb’s field of view.”
Roman will work hand-in-hand with Webb to offer clues about how galaxies formed from the primordial gas that once filled the universe, and how their central supermassive black holes influenced galaxy and star formation. The observations will help uncover the cosmic daybreakers that illuminated our universe and ultimately made life on Earth possible.
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is managed at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, with participation by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Caltech/IPAC in Southern California, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, and a science team comprising scientists from various research institutions. The primary industrial partners are BAE Systems, Inc in Boulder, Colorado; L3Harris Technologies in Rochester, New York; and Teledyne Scientific & Imaging in Thousand Oaks, California.
Download high-resolution video and images from NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio
By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Media contact:
Claire Andreoli
claire.andreoli@nasa.gov
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
301-286-1940
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Last Updated Jul 25, 2024 ContactAshley Balzerashley.m.balzer@nasa.govLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Active Galaxies Astrophysics Black Holes Galaxies Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Galaxies, Stars, & Black Holes Research Goddard Space Flight Center James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) Origin & Evolution of the Universe Science & Research Stars Supermassive Black Holes The Big Bang The Universe View the full article
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By NASA
NASA Astronaut Eileen Collins, STS-93 commander, looks through a checklist on the space shuttle Columbia’s middeck in this July 1999 image. Collins was the first female shuttle commander.
Collins graduated in 1979 from Air Force Undergraduate Pilot Training at Vance AFB, Oklahoma, where she was a T-38 instructor pilot until 1982. She continued her career as an instructor pilot of different aircraft until 1989. She was selected for the astronaut program while attending the Air Force Test Pilot School at Edwards AFB, California, which she graduated from in 1990. Collins became an astronaut in 1991 and over the course of four spaceflights, logged over 872 hours in space. She retired from NASA in May 2006.
Image credit: NASA
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By NASA
Rebekah Hounsell is an assistant research scientist working on ways to optimize and build infrastructure for future observations made by the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The mission will shed light on many astrophysics topics, like dark energy, which are currently shrouded in mystery. Rebekah also works as a support scientist for the TESS (Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite) mission, helping scientists access and analyze data.
Name: Rebekah Hounsell
Title: Assistant Research Scientist
Formal Job Classification: Support Scientist for the TESS mission and Co-Principal Investigator of the Roman Supernova Project Infrastructure Team (PIT)
Organization: Code 667.0
Rebekah Hounsell knew she wanted to study space from a very young age. Now, she’s a scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. NASA/Chris Gunn What do you do and what is most interesting about your role at Goddard?
I am fortunate to have several roles at Goddard. I am a support scientist for TESS. Here I aid the community in accessing and analyzing TESS data. I am a co-principal investigator of a Roman project infrastructure team, focusing on building infrastructure to support supernova cosmology with the Roman HLTDS (High Latitude Time-Domain Survey). In addition, I am part of the Physics of the Cosmos program analysis group executive committee, co-chairing both the Cosmic Structure Science interest group and the Time-Domain and Multi-Messenger Astrophysics Science interest group. In these roles I have been fortunate enough to get a glimpse into how missions such as TESS and Roman work and how we can make them a success for the community. Missions like TESS are paving the way for future wide area surveys like Roman, providing a plethora of high cadence transient and variable star data, which can be used to gain a better understanding of our universe and our place within it.
How will your current work influence the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope’s future observations?
The Roman team I am leading is tasked with developing a pixels-to-cosmology pipeline for the analysis of supernova data from the HLTDS. What this means is that we will develop tools to aid the community in obtaining supernova lightcurves and prism spectra, which are precise enough to be used in testing various cosmological modes. We are also working to develop tools which will allow the community to test various HLTDS designs, adjusting cadence, filters, exposure times, etc., to best optimize its output for their science.
What got you interested in astrophysics? What was your path to your current role?
When I was a child I lived in a very rural area in England, with little to no light pollution. I had a wonderful view of the night sky and was fascinated by stars. I remember when I found out that the universe was expanding and my first thought was “into what?” I think it was that which fueled my curiosity about space and pushed me into astrophysics. At about 10 years old, I decided astrophysics was the path for me, and after that I really started to focus on physics and math at school.
At 18, 19 I went to Liverpool University/Liverpool John Moores and completed my master’s in astrophysics in 2008. I then went on to obtain my Ph.D., focusing on classical and recurrent novae. In 2012 I received my first postdoc at STScI (the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore). It was at STScI that I learned about how the instruments operating on Hubble worked and figured out that what I really loved doing was working on data and improving it. At the time however, I wasn’t ready to leave academia altogether, so I took another postdoc at the University of Illinois Champaign Urbana/UC Santa Cruz. It was here that I first started working on Roman, only back then it was known as WFIRST. I was a member of a Supernova Science Investigation Team for WFIRST and worked to optimize the design of what was then known as the SN survey, later to become the HLTDS. During this time I published a paper that created some of the most realistic simulations of the survey, including various statistical and systematic effects. After this I headed to the University of Pennsylvania to work on core collapse supernovae from the Dark Energy Survey. This was an exciting data set, but again I realized what I really liked doing was working on data from or for a mission. As such I took my current job at NASA.
Rebekah stands by a model of NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. The observatory’s deployable aperture cover, or sun shade, is visible in the background in the largest clean room at Goddard.NASA/David Friedlander What are you most looking forward to exploring through Roman’s eyes?
Given the nature of the mission, Roman is going to discover a plethora of transient events. Some of these will be extremely rare and if caught in one of Roman’s high cadenced, deep fields, the data obtained will be able to shed new light on the physics driving these phenomena. I am also excited about these data being used with those from other observatories including the Vera C. Rubin Observatory and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
What has surprised you the most about the universe as you’ve learned more about it?
We are still discovering so many new things which shed new light on the universe, its evolution, and our place in it. In recent years we have learned about kilonovae, gravitational waves, and we’ve discovered various diverse supernovae. There are so many extreme and complex events that we are still trying to understand, and I suspect that Roman will reveal even more.
What is your favorite thing about working for NASA?
There is no one path to working at NASA. I have met so many people who entered into the field following completely different paths than myself. I love this. We all have something different to bring to the table and those differences are what makes NASA what it is today.
A portrait of Rebekah in front of the NASA meatball.NASA/David Friedlander What hobbies fill your time outside of work?
I like to paint and draw. I also enjoy looking after animals. I also love participating in outreach events. When I lived in Philly I helped to set up the Astronomy on Tap branch there. I think it is important to talk about what we do and why it is needed.
What advice do you have for others who are interested in working in astronomy?
There is no one path. Don’t think you have to complete x, y, z steps and then you make it. That is not true. Do what you are passionate about, what you enjoy to learn about. And most importantly ask questions! Learn about what others are doing in the field, how they got there, and figure out what works for you.
By Ashley Balzer
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md.
Conversations With Goddard is a collection of Q&A profiles highlighting the breadth and depth of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s talented and diverse workforce. The Conversations have been published twice a month on average since May 2011. Read past editions on Goddard’s “Our People” webpage.
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Last Updated Jul 16, 2024 ContactAshley Balzerashley.m.balzer@nasa.govLocationGoddard Space Flight Center Related Terms
People of NASA Careers Goddard Space Flight Center Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope People of Goddard Women at NASA Explore More
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