The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, or Roman, is NASA’s next large astrophysics mission, due to be launched in late 2026. Roman will have a wavelength range, aperture, and angular resolution similar to the Hubble Space Telescope, but will have ~100 times the field-of-view and ~1000 times the sky mapping speed. This means it will be able to map large areas of the sky relatively quickly, or smaller areas of the sky repeatedly with a short cadence. One of the core community surveys during the Roman prime mission will be the Roman Galactic Bulge Time Domain Survey (RGBTDS), which will monitor ~2 sq. degrees toward the Galactic center with a cadence of ~15 minutes in a wide 1-2 micron filter over 6 seasons of 60-72 days, for a total survey duration of 380 – 440 days. The RGBTDS is expected to detect ~1500 cold bound planets and hundreds of frigid free-floating planets using the microlensing technique. It will also detect ~100,000 hot and warm transiting planets. The transit and microlensing demographic constraints with Roman will provide the first statistical census of exoplanets within a single stellar population, complete to planets with radii/masses greater than twice that of the Earth over all semimajor axes, from zero to infinity.

Speaker: Scott Gaudi (The Ohio State University, Caroline Herschel Distinguished Visitor)

This Fall Colloquium will be held in person at JHU's Schafler Auditorium in the Bloomberg Center for Physics and Astronomy.

Please direct questions or comments to contact above. The 2024 Fall Colloquium Committee members are: Nestor Espinoza (STScI), Joel Green (STScI), Nick Indriolo (STScI), Elena Manjavacas (STScI), Namrata Roy (JHU), Kevin Schlaufman (JHU), Ethan Vishniac (JHU).