Tucson Standard

NASA has launched a new space telescope, SPHEREx, to investigate the origins of the universe. The mission will utilize advanced software from the Arizona Cosmology Lab at the University of Arizona to analyze data and help astronomers understand events that occurred in the first trillionth of a second after the Big Bang.

SPHEREx, short for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer, is designed to collect optical and infrared data on over 450 million galaxies and more than 100 million stars in the Milky Way over two years. The University of Arizona collaborates with partners such as the California Institute of Technology, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Ball Aerospace, and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute.

The mission aims to achieve three primary goals: search for water ice within the Milky Way as a potential sign of life beyond Earth, explore galaxy origins using intensity mapping, and study the early history of the universe. Researchers are particularly interested in understanding what happened during inflation when quantum fluctuations expanded rapidly.

"Galaxies trace the presence of dark matter," said Tim Eifler from U of A Steward Observatory. "Where there are a lot of galaxies, there is likely a lot of dark matter because of gravity."

SPHEREx will map millions upon millions of stars and galaxies by measuring them multiple times across its mission duration. "We hope to see imprints from the very early universe by making the largest 3D map of galaxies that has ever existed," stated Elisabeth Krause from U of A.

Former postdoctoral student Yosuke Kobayashi developed mathematical models to extract relevant information about galaxies. The Arizona Cosmology Lab has implemented machine learning techniques to enhance software performance using high-performance computing systems at U of A.

"Computational speed has always been a bottleneck when predicting what we see in the universe," Eifler explained. "We're training a neural network with some equations; later analysis will be much faster."

Once SPHEREx begins operations in orbit, researchers at Arizona Cosmology Lab will start analyzing vast data catalogs to refine cosmological models revealing insights into early cosmic events.