Bryce Wedig
Research / The Roman View of Strong Gravitational Lenses

The Roman View of Strong Gravitational Lenses

How many galaxy-scale strong lenses will Roman find, and what will they tell us about dark matter at sub-galactic scales?

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled for launch in late 2026, will play a transformative role in strong lensing science with its planned wide-field surveys. With its remarkable 0.281 square degree field of view and diffraction-limited angular resolution of ~0.1 arcsec, Roman is uniquely suited to characterizing dark matter substructure from a robust population of strong lenses.

As a member of the Roman Strong Lensing Wide Field Science team, I am working to prepare for the analysis of Roman’s galaxy-scale strong lenses, with a particular focus on constraining the nature of dark matter at sub-galactic scales.

Figure 1. How the variation of the point-spread function across Roman's 0.281 deg² field of view will affect dark matter substructure studies with Roman