The NASA aerospace agency has approved the SPHEREx spectrophotometric observatory project to study distant galaxies, the expansion of the Universe and search for biogenic molecules. This is reported by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The telescope is the first in the world to create a map of all-sky spectrometry in the near infrared range. With it, scientists will split near-infrared light into individual wavelengths or colors – like a prism breaks sunlight into its component colors.
Through this research, scientists hope to gain information on what the object is made of, since some chemical elements absorb and emit light of a certain length. This method will also allow researchers to determine the object’s distance from the Earth, so the specified map will be three-dimensional.
In addition to creating this map, the observatory will study the rapid expansion of the Universe after the Big Bang, the history of the formation of galaxies, and also look for key biogenic molecules in protoplanetary disks and molecular clouds.
The telescope will be created for two and a half years.
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