NASA's Roman Telescope Is About to Find 100,000 Exoplanets. Why is this exciting?

A New Era in Exoplanet Discovery

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launched at the end of August, is projected to discover on the order of 100,000 exoplanets over the course of its mission. It will use a combination of transit and gravitational microlensing detection methods.

This number is roughly sixteen times the total number of exoplanets (~6000) confirmed by every telescope in the history of astronomy combined. Roman gets there by staring at the same dense field, toward the crowded center of the Milky Way, over and over for years.

Beyond Numbers: Studying Exoplanet Populations

The jump from 6,000 to 100,000 isn't only about numbers. It's the difference between studying individual planets one at a time and having enough of them to study populations: how planetary systems form and vary across different regions of the galaxy, not just what any single planet looks like.

The Role of Rakiura Labs

That kind of population-scale catalog is exactly the raw material two Rakiura labs are built around.

• Limits of Habitability, led by Stanford Science Fellow Michelle Hill, studies what makes a planet capable of holding liquid surface water: modeling interior evolution, carbon cycling, and atmosphere retention across catalogued planets, then narrowing a large raw list down to the ones that can actually sustain habitability over time.

• Project Starshade, led by MIT astrophysicist Sara Seager, works a level deeper: along with cataloguing planets, it develops a giant flower-shaped screen flown in formation with a space telescope, designed to block a star's glare well enough to directly image an Earth-like planet and eventually read its atmosphere for signs of life.

A survey the size of Roman's is the raw material both labs are built around. Limits of Habitability needs volume to model habitability at a population level, and Starshade needs a larger, better-characterized target list to know which planets are worth pointing an imaging mission at in the first place.

Community Research Opportunities

Both labs take on community researchers through Rakiura Labs, and both run that work the same way: mentored, open-ended, and open to people without an academic affiliation. Each lab defines specific projects where it needs particular expertise or simply more hands.

• At Limits of Habitability, the active project is TESS-Keck Survey Data Validation, which means checking candidate planet detections directly.

• At Project Starshade, it's the Starshade Science Case, building the scientific argument for the mission.

Community Research members work on these projects alongside the lab, gaining mentored research experience while contributing to research that's happening right now.