NASA’s SPHEREx observatory completes stunning 1st cosmic map
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NASA originally posted this article on December 18, 2025. Edits by EarthSky.
NASA’s SPHEREx observatory completes stunning 1st cosmic map
Launched in March 2025, NASA’s SPHEREx space telescope has completed its first infrared map of the entire sky in 102 colors. While not visible to the human eye, these 102 infrared wavelengths of light are prevalent in the cosmos. And observing the entire sky this way enables scientists to answer big questions, including how a dramatic event that occurred in the first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang influenced the distribution of hundreds of millions of galaxies in our universe.
In addition, scientists will use the data to study how galaxies have changed over the universe’s nearly 14-billion-year history, and learn about the distribution of key ingredients for life in our own galaxy.
Shawn Domagal-Goldman, director of the Astrophysics Division at NASA Headquarters in Washington, said:
It’s incredible how much information SPHEREx has collected in just six months, information that will be especially valuable when used alongside our other missions’ data to better understand our universe.
We essentially have 102 new maps of the entire sky, each one in a different wavelength and containing unique information about the objects it sees. I think every astronomer is going to find something of value here, as NASA’s missions enable the world to answer fundamental questions about how the universe got its start, and how it changed to eventually create a home for us in it.
This panoramic view of SPHEREx’s first all-sky map shows how the sky looks to the telescope. It transitions between observations of colors emitted by hot hydrogen gas (blue) and cosmic dust (red), and those primarily emitted by stars. Via NASA/ JPL-Caltech.
What makes SPHEREx special?
Circling Earth about 14 1/2 times a day, SPHEREx (which stands for Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization, and Ices Explorer) travels from north to south, passing over the poles.
Each day it takes about 3,600 images along one circular strip of the sky, and as the days pass and the planet moves around the sun, SPHEREx’s field of view shifts as well. After six months, the observatory has looked out into space in every direction, capturing the entire sky in 360 degrees.
The mission began mapping the sky in May and completed its first all-sky mosaic in December. It will complete three additional all-sky scans during its two-year primary mission. Merging those maps together will increase the sensitivity of the measurements.
The entire dataset is freely available to scientists and the public.
JPL Director Dave Gallagher said:
SPHEREx is a mid-sized astrophysics mission delivering big science. It’s a phenomenal example of how we turn bold ideas into reality, and in doing so, unlock enormous potential for discovery.
Superpowered telescope
Each of the 102 colors detected by SPHEREx represents a wavelength of infrared light, and each wavelength provides unique information about the galaxies, stars, planet-forming regions, and other cosmic features therein.
For example, dense clouds of dust in our galaxy where stars and planets form radiate brightly in certain wavelengths, but emit no light (and are therefore totally invisible) in others. The process of separating the light from a source into its component wavelengths is called spectroscopy.
And while a handful of previous missions have also mapped the entire sky, such as NASA’s Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), none have done so in nearly as many colors as SPHEREx. By contrast, NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope can do spectroscopy with significantly more wavelengths of light than SPHEREx, but with a field of view thousands of times smaller. The combination of colors and such a wide field of view is why SPHEREx is so powerful.
Beth Fabinsky, the SPHEREx project manager at JPL, said:
The superpower of SPHEREx is that it captures the whole sky in 102 colors about every six months. That’s an amazing amount of information to gather in a short amount of time.
I think this makes us the mantis shrimp of telescopes, because we have an amazing multicolor visual detection system and we can also see a very wide swath of our surroundings.
Each frame of this movie shows the entire sky in a different infrared wavelength, indicated by the color bar in the top right corner. Taken by NASA’s SPHEREx observatory, the maps illustrate how viewing the universe in different wavelengths of light can reveal unique cosmic features. Via NASA/ JPL-Caltech.
6 detectors, 102 colors
To accomplish this feat, SPHEREx uses six detectors, each paired with a specially designed filter that contains a gradient of 17 colors. That means every image taken with those six detectors contains 102 colors (six times 17). It also means that every all-sky map that SPHEREx produces is really 102 maps, each in a different color.
The observatory will use those colors to measure the distance to hundreds of millions of galaxies. Though the positions of most of those galaxies have already been mapped in two dimensions by other observatories, SPHEREx’s map will be in 3D, enabling scientists to measure subtle variations in the way galaxies are clustered and distributed across the universe.
Those measurements will offer insights into an event that took place in the first billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. In this moment, called inflation, the universe expanded by a trillion-trillionfold. Nothing like it has occurred in the universe since, and scientists want to understand it better. The SPHEREx mission’s approach is one way to help in that effort.
Bottom line: NASA’s SPHEREx has produced its spectacular 1st cosmic map, revealing the entire sky in 102 colors.
Read more: First 1% of new cosmic atlas reveals millions of galaxies
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