We’ve got our starglasses on! 🤩 Roman’s Coronagraph Instrument has activated. This system of masks, prisms, detectors, and self-flexing mirrors will block out the glare from distant stars and directly image the planets and disks in orbit around them.

Glare is the enemy. Contrast is the score.

Roman’s coronagraph is a game‑changer for direct imaging. Looking forward to seeing the first exoplanet snapshots

Exciting! Let's have a good look to space! 🔭👀

First light!

The 'starglasses' are officially on! 😎 Giant congratulations to the entire Roman team on getting the Coronagraph Instrument online. Direct imaging is going to rewrite our textbooks, and I cannot wait to see the first clear planet disks start rolling in!

Excited to see new pictures in deep space.

Directly imaging planets around other stars - something impossible and unimaginble in the pre-Roman era.

Well that was cool to learn

So cool!

Blot out the star, keep what orbits it. We are about to see other worlds as pixels instead of math. The Fermi question stops being philosophy the moment one of those pixels shows an atmosphere it has no business having.

Another milestone checked off! Keep 'em comin'!

Way over my head, but I'm still enraptured by what mortal man has accomplished. I will never shake the feelings I have of being so small and insignificant while also being so thankful to be alive to wonder at it all. Life is so good.

And also can you explain that how it will detect the "Dark matter"?

@NASAJPL I love that lense filter designe, studied some in Physics. Any paper?

Is that the Tabla music in the background??

Starglasses is perfect. The wild bit: those deformable mirrors flex by nanometers to cancel a star's glare so a colder, older Jupiter can finally peek through. First space coronagraph with active wavefront control. A telescope learning to squint on purpose.

When do first images start coming? @grok

@NASAJPL Neat!

I'm assuming it's the Corona graph that shares a partial structure with the microscope or the concept of bending the light

Genius!

That coronagraph blocking starlight is precise engineering.

The instrument targets colder, older giant planets in closer orbits than previously imaged, advancing beyond hot young exoplanets and complementing Roman's microlensing and transit detection methods.

The Bullet Cluster is classic dark-matter proof: hot gas separates from most of the mass. Roman’s next move is statistical — weak lensing across hundreds of millions of galaxies. Clip:

Almost your birthday 🎊

Wow!!!!!🥰

Deformable mirror...Isn't that similar to the adaptable optics used by ground-based telescopes like Keck?

Nice!

This is the way

That glare gap is the whole game: a coronagraph acts like starglasses, suppressing the star so a much fainter cold giant can emerge beside it. Stars can be ~100 million× brighter than their planets—Roman is teaching us how to hold the glare still.

Exciting new telescope… more telescopes, more better!

I'm the kind of person who needs observations of just a tiny fraction to tell you the structure and how it works

Que equipamento. 😮😮😮

👍👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏👏