The new mission of the JPL space seeks to disentangle the mystery of cosmic “inflation”

Before there was light, there was cosmic inflation.

Before life, the planet earth, the first galaxies – and even before the violent explosion of hot hot stuff hot, scientists have traditionally considered Big Bang – our universe was in an exotic state, developing exponentially at an unfathomable rate.

It extended so quickly that in about a billion billion billion billion seconds of seconds, a piece of space the size of an atom would have exploded in a much larger size than our solar system. This brought our slice of the universe – everything we can see in the night sky – from an incomprehensibly small point to a size coarsely between that of a human head and a block of city.

But while the modern universe is riddled with evidence that this strange prologue to the universe that physicists call “inflation” probably occurred, scientists still do not know exactly why it happened.

A new spacecraft from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA in La Cañada Flintridge, launching on Tuesday evening on a SpaceX rocket from Vandenberg Space Force near Lompoc, hopes to discover it.

The mission – the spectro -photometer for the history of the universe, the time of the Réionization and the Explorer Ices; or Spherex – will examine one of the indices of inflation left. From his data, scientists hope to better understand the culprit (or the culprits) behind rapid expansion.

During two years, SPHEREX will create four three -dimensional cards of the propagation of galaxies throughout the sky, allowing scientists to search for subatomic quantum undulations created by unknown inflation particles 13.8 billion years ago, now engraved in the large -scale structure of the universe.

“He is zooming in to map the cosmos and see the biggest structures and the largest image, unlike large telescopes such as (the James Webb space telescope) which will zoom in and take very detailed images on small specific areas of the sky” James Bock, professor of Caltech physics, main researcher of JPL and main researcher of SPHEREX.

While the universe has developed since its first moments, physicists only reserve the term “inflation” only for rapid and exponential expansion governed by unknown physics at the beginning of the universe as we know it.

Inflation still has its detractors who say that the inflation process would have needed incredibly improbable circumstances to launch in the first place and that – in the absence of the ability to directly detect exotic inflation particles – current indirect proof of their existence remains insufficient. However, inflation is widely accepted in the field as the best explanation of a range of strange phenomena in our modern universe.

Amelia Quan, the lead of mechanical integration for the NASA spherex mission, is visible with a V-Groove radiator, a material that will help keep the cold space telescope, with a laboratory jet.

(NASA / JPL-CALTECH)

The different theories of inflation disagree on certain figures and details, but the general history takes place like this: everything that existed before inflation has exploded instantly once the great expansion has started.

During inflation, no form of material, we still know was present. Instead, the universe was filled with unknown energy and particles. As they fluctuated, they created undulations in the energy field – higher energy pockets and lower energy pockets.

What is not yet clear, however, is exactly what this field of energy and particles were, or if there were several sets of energy fields and particles at work. But all that Spherex will find will have almost certainly been created by wild particles outside the field of physics as we know it.

When inflation has moved away, the energy field and its transmogrified fluctuations into an incredibly hot and dense soup of what we know today – finally becoming the light we see and the protons, neutrons and electrons that make up our world.

This warm, dense and emerging universe, under enormous pressure, exploded outwards, as described by the traditional theory of Big Bang Chaude developed in the 1920s. Inflation was Revision of physicists During the first moments of the universe, designed in the 1980s to take into account certain strange effects in the universe.

The quantum undulations of inflation energy are never left. While they started on a subatomic scale, they are now larger than galaxies. The higher energy stains have transformed into brilliant and animated corners of the universe with many galaxies. Lower energy stains are now relative dead areas.

The network of galaxies that we see when we look at the sky is an instantaneous of the drama which took place in a small subatomic section of space about 13.8 billion years ago.

The Spherex team thinks there is even more in this drama hidden in the right details of this web.

The probe will create, for the first time, three -dimensional sky cards with sufficient precision and data to reveal if it was a single energy field responsible for inflation, or if it was multiple.

“If you throw a small pebble in a pond, it creates undulations,” said Spencer Everett, a Caltech researcher working on the SPPHEREX mission. “Then inflation suddenly inflates them in these massive waves in an ocean.”

While the theories of inflation in a single field are analogous to the establishment of a pile of pebbles the same as in the pond, said Everett, multi-champs theories are like throwing many pebbles and rocks of size of different in water. By looking at the resulting undulations, scientists should be able to determine whether several sizes of stones – or inflation particles, in the case of Spherex – created them.

Evidence of spherex that the propagation of galaxies in the universe does not resemble undulations of a single field (or a pebble of a single size in the analogy of Everett) not only would serve inflation to a strong proof, but that would also effectively put the theories with unique field on their death beds.

By launching into space, Spherex will have views of practically all the sky because it will orbit the earth. Spherex must also look at light infrared wavelengths, with wavelengths slightly longer than the red color. However, it is also the wavelength to which most objects, including the soil of the earth, radiate heat.

“If you try to measure anything in the infrared on the ground,” said Everett, “you just will see the ground. At temperatures close to room temperature, everything is issued in the infrared.”

For this reason, the spaceship will operate at a fahrenheit of less than 350 degrees, kept cool by aluminum shields in the shape of a concentric cone which resemble a dog cone for a spacecraft.

Spherex is a middle class mission in the NASA explorers program, designed to offer frequent flight and funding possibilities for spatial scientific missions on a less ambitious scale than NASA's flagship missions such as the James Webb space telescope, a $ 10 billion mission that was launched in 2021 to explore a wide range of research space.

The mission will also probe how some of the first galaxies were formed and how the icy cosmic dust carrying molecules important for life is found on planets.

Spherex will climb alongside a mission of small class explorers – called the polarimeter to unify the crown and the heliosphere, or punch – which will study the solar wind.