Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
AD | Go to https://ground.news/drbecky to stay fully informed with the latest Space and Science news. Save 40% off the Vantage plan through my link for unlimited access | NASA’s brand new telescope is about to do in one month, what would’ve taken the Hubble space telescope a century to do.
That telescope is called Roman, and it launches really soon on Sunday, 30th August 2026.
Roman is the follow-up to Hubble, it's the same size and so will give us the same level of detail in images, but it’s also been designed to look at a much bigger area of sky in a single observation: its field of view is a hundred times bigger than Hubble’s!
That’s why Roman is being put to work doing surveys of the sky, splitting the sky up into patches and taking an image of every patch to meticulously record what we find there.
So while all the images taken by Hubble in its 36 year lifetime have only covered less than 1% of the entire sky, Roman will cover 12% of the sky in just 17 months, a feat that would’ve taken Hubble 1700 years.
But it’s not just about doing things faster than Hubble, it's about the questions the data from Roman will help us answer…
Papers mentioned:
Pacucci et al. (2023) - iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad0158/pdf
Rose et al. (2025) - arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05161
Karmen et al. (2026) - arxiv.org/html/2602.04947#S3.F6
Wedig et al. (2025) - iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/adc24f/pdf
Previous videos:
More on Roman: youtube.com/watch?v=-EiTby2Lku8
The Crisis is Cosmology: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd19WvC9yqUf5TRqYoMYxEwjT6JIDW4Zn
More on Habitable Worlds Observatory: youtu.be/z2JIkAPcdnU?si=evZWmEs_JTnbVlOi
youtube.com/watch?v=T1JuCPhONlg&list=PLd19WvC9yqUf5TRqYoMYxEwjT6JIDW4Zn&index=3
00:00 - Introduction
01:50 - I - Is our best model of the Universe wrong?
06:17 - II - Where’s the dividing line between planet and star?
09:26 - III - How did supermassive black holes get so supermassive?
13:19 - IV - Can we hunt for exoplanets by taking a direct image of their reflected light?
16:10 - V - Where is all the dark matter found in the Universe?
19:11 - Bloopers
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: martino.freelance@gmail.com
Video produced by Marina Hui & Dr Becky Smethurst
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📚 My book, "A Brief History of Black Holes", out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): lnk.to/DrBecky
---
👕 My merch, including JWST designs, are available here (with worldwide shipping!): dr-becky.teemill.com
---
🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive
---
🔔 Don't forget to subscribe and click the little bell icon to be notified when I post a new video!
---
👩🏽💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
drbecky.uk.com
AD | Go to https://ground.news/drbecky to stay fully informed with the latest Space and Science news. Save 40% off the Vantage plan through my link for unlimited access | NASA’s brand new telescope is about to do in one month, what would’ve taken the Hubble space telescope a century to do.
That telescope is called Roman, and it launches really soon on Sunday, 30th August 2026.
Roman is the follow-up to Hubble, it's the same size and so will give us the same level of detail in images, but it’s also been designed to look at a much bigger area of sky in a single observation: its field of view is a hundred times bigger than Hubble’s!
That’s why Roman is being put to work doing surveys of the sky, splitting the sky up into patches and taking an image of every patch to meticulously record what we find there.
So while all the images taken by Hubble in its 36 year lifetime have only covered less than 1% of the entire sky, Roman will cover 12% of the sky in just 17 months, a feat that would’ve taken Hubble 1700 years.
But it’s not just about doing things faster than Hubble, it's about the questions the data from Roman will help us answer…
Papers mentioned:
Pacucci et al. (2023) - iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad0158/pdf
Rose et al. (2025) - arxiv.org/pdf/2506.05161
Karmen et al. (2026) - arxiv.org/html/2602.04947#S3.F6
Wedig et al. (2025) - iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/adc24f/pdf
Previous videos:
More on Roman: youtube.com/watch?v=-EiTby2Lku8
The Crisis is Cosmology: youtube.com/playlist?list=PLd19WvC9yqUf5TRqYoMYxEwjT6JIDW4Zn
More on Habitable Worlds Observatory: youtu.be/z2JIkAPcdnU?si=evZWmEs_JTnbVlOi
youtube.com/watch?v=T1JuCPhONlg&list=PLd19WvC9yqUf5TRqYoMYxEwjT6JIDW4Zn&index=3
00:00 - Introduction
01:50 - I - Is our best model of the Universe wrong?
06:17 - II - Where’s the dividing line between planet and star?
09:26 - III - How did supermassive black holes get so supermassive?
13:19 - IV - Can we hunt for exoplanets by taking a direct image of their reflected light?
16:10 - V - Where is all the dark matter found in the Universe?
19:11 - Bloopers
Video filmed on a Sony ⍺7 IV
Video edited by Martino Gasparrini: martino.freelance@gmail.com
Video produced by Marina Hui & Dr Becky Smethurst
---
📚 My book, "A Brief History of Black Holes", out NOW in hardback, paperback, e-book and audiobook (which I narrated myself!): lnk.to/DrBecky
---
👕 My merch, including JWST designs, are available here (with worldwide shipping!): dr-becky.teemill.com
---
🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive
---
🔔 Don't forget to subscribe and click the little bell icon to be notified when I post a new video!
---
👩🏽💻 I'm Dr. Becky Smethurst, an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford. I love making videos about science with an unnatural level of enthusiasm. I like to focus on how we know things, not just what we know. And especially, the things we still don't know. If you've ever wondered about something in space and couldn't find an answer online - you can ask me! My day job is to do research into how supermassive black holes can affect the galaxies that they live in. In particular, I look at whether the energy output from the disk of material orbiting around a growing supermassive black hole can stop a galaxy from forming stars.
drbecky.uk.com
