Look up at the night sky with your naked eye and it may seem like it rarely changes. Yet the universe is in constant flux. Stars drift through space, orbiting the centre of the Milky Way as planets orbit them. They rotate, showing off spots on their surfaces and sometimes producing violent outbursts that affect planetary atmospheres much like solar storms produce auroras on the Earth.

As stars age, they can die dramatically as supernovae, releasing material that will form the next generation of stars and planets.

A new NASA telescope — named after NASA’s first chief of astronomy and first female executive, Nancy Grace Roman — will let us observe these changes to the night sky, almost as if we are watching a cosmic high-definition movie.

This is thanks to three capabilities working together: sharp images, a huge field of view and repeated observations.

Watching the sky change

The Nancy Grace Roman Telescope is often described as the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope. It has the same size mirror as Hubble and also observes visible and infrared light. But it is capable of observing a much larger patch of the sky — up to 200 times larger.

Usually, seeing a bigger patch of sky means sacrificing spatial........

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