UC Berkeley will help lead the UltraViolet EXplorer, or UVEX, mission — a $300 million orbiting space telescope and satellite project scheduled to launch in 2030 — to conduct the first all-sky survey of ultraviolet sources across the universe.
NASA approved the mission last month, and it will be managed by UC Berkeley’s Space Sciences Laboratory and helmed by alumna Fiona Harrison, who now teaches at the California Institute of Technology.
“UVEX will tell us the very first chapter of the story of a supernova explosion, and later observations will complete the story,” said campus associate professor of astronomy and physics Raffaella Margutti in an email. “From a stellar evolution perspective, UVEX will tell the very final chapter of the story of a star before collapse.”
The UVEX mission will map millions of star-forming, low-mass galaxies in the local universe. The current understanding of dark matter predicts that there should be millions of these types of galaxies in Earth’s galactic neighborhood, according to campus associate professor of astronomy Dan Weisz.
Because these galaxies host massive stars that are as bright as UV wavelengths, observations made through the UVEX mission will find these galaxies, map their positions and compare predictions from different dark matter models.
“UVEX will cover the entire sky to faint limits similar to these other surveys and will have a similar time cadence, so it will detect events that vary on human timescales,” Weisz said in an email. “Crucially, it provides ultraviolet wavelength coverage, which provides insight into a huge range of phenomena such as white dwarfs.”
Additionally, Weisz noted that stars that are more than eight times the mass of the sun end their lives as exotic objects, such as black holes, and often explode as supernovae. Throughout this process, they release many familiar elements — such as carbon and oxygen — and form the “building block of life.”
Campus professor of astronomy Ryan Chornock mentioned that these moments occur at the beginning of the explosion, usually within the first few minutes to hours, with many of the most useful collectible data materializing at UV wavelengths.
Weisz noted UVEX is designed to be agile enough for observations to be conducted immediately after an explosion in UV, making it the first telescope of its kind to do so — he called this a “game-changer.”
“With UVEX, we will get data the same day as the explosion for dozens of events per year,” Chornock said in an email. “This routine data collection will revolutionize our understanding of the deaths of massive stars.”
