NASA's Roman Telescope to Hunt Distant Exoplanets Using Gravitational Microlensing

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, lifted off on Aug. 30, 2026, is now en route to a position roughly a million miles from Earth where it will conduct its Galactic Bulge Time-Domain Survey. The telescope will monitor six crowded regions toward the Milky Way’s center, imaging hundreds of millions of stars about every 12 minutes across six intensive seasons. This cadence is designed to catch the fleeting gravitational microlensing events that temporarily amplify a distant star’s light, allowing scientists to infer the presence of orbiting planets, including those on wide, cold orbits and even free-floating rogue planets.

In addition, the same data set will reveal around 100,000 planets via the transit method, which detects periodic dimming of a star. By combining microlensing and transit discoveries, Roman will fill gaps in one outlet exoplanet census and help answer how planetary systems are built throughout the galaxy.