Astronomers are hoping it could tell them information about the period just after the Big Bang. And it lasted a very brief moment. It's the so-called cosmic inflation.
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This occurred 0.000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds after the big bang and ended 0.0000000000000000000000000000001 seconds after the big bang. 🤯 A really short period of time!!
But in this supershort period, the universe expanded and grew a BILLION BILLION TIMES!!! A tiny universe has become a giant. And experts suspect that this inflation has had an impact on how matter is distributed in the universe today.
SPHEREx will map 450 million galaxies, and it is this distribution of matter that it will "shine a light" on. The universe is incredibly regular, and no matter which way you look, it's more or less the same. But there are tiny differences, and that's what they're interested in.
But the telescope will also focus on a much closer area. It will be looking for water in our galaxy. We know it's there, mostly in the form of ice frozen on dust particles. But we don't know exactly how much is there. In fact, we don't even know exactly how it got there (and here on Earth).
The telescope will determine this by spectral analysis of the light emitted by such particles. Many compounds or elements, such as water, have a unique "fingerprint" in their spectra. And that's what SPHEREx will be able to measure.
It will survey the entire sky in the first six months and all the data will be publicly available. This will help scientists working with JWST, for example. Thanks to SPHEREx, they will be able to pick out interesting objects, which they will then be able to look at in much more detail with JWST.
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