SphereX is NASA's
latest explorer mission in astrophysics, and I'm very excited about it.
Sphere X is going to answer some fundamental questions.
It's going to tell us about the origin of the universe, the birth and formation
history of galaxies, and the abundance of essential molecules
such as water in the early stages of star
and planet formation.
In this catalog, we expect to have, spectra of
of order, half a billion galaxies, hundreds of millions of stars.
And because we're covering the entire sky, we can expect some unusual
objects as well.
We will expect to see some black holes.
The first black holes to light up in the center of galaxies.
In the early, early times at the edge of the universe.
We can also expect to see,
some rare events and stars in our own galaxy.
Stars that are undergoing, bombardment period where comets
and asteroids are coming into the inner solar system in these systems.
And so it's going to be very exciting.
And we expect, some discoveries from this.
SphereX is unique because it,
does something that hasn't been done before.
It covers the entire sky.
But instead of doing this, like in camera fashion, where we just take a picture,
we're actually taking, what astronomers call a spectrum.
We're splitting up the light into
multiple wavelengths, and we take that spectrum everywhere on the sky.
So that's a unique tool.
And it, allows us, for example, to study inflation
because we get the distances of galaxies through their spectra
and we cover the entire sky that way.
The wavelengths we're studying
are out in the, near infrared.
So, SphereX starts at wavelengths just beyond where your eye can see,
the optical, to wavelengths that are about ten times longer,
that, than than what we see here in the visible.
And so that range is
the range of interest for, seeing the fingerprints of galaxies,
but also seeing the fingerprints from some important atoms and molecules.
SphereX isn't a big telescope, but we can study the
the imprints of galaxy formation,
on, on large scales and,
and we not only can
see this, perhaps the beginnings of galaxy formation,
we can actually map out its entire history.
And we're not doing this in individual galaxies.
We're kind of seeing the big picture over, multiple,
multiple, galaxies.
And so SphereX is going to study the,
abundance of, of ices, water, but also important species
that are have key materials for life, such as carbon dioxide and methanol.
It's going to study the abundance of those ices
in the early stages of star formation, going from the dense
molecular clouds before there were stars to the early stages of stars,
turn on and form these material disks that eventually turn into planetary systems.