Roman Infrared Nearby Galaxies Survey

A Wide Field Science program will develop community software to simulate and analyze Roman surveys of nearby galaxies. Roman’s wide field, sensitivity to faint stars and compact sources, and near-infrared bandpasses will permit panoramic mapping of hundreds of nearby galaxies out to their virial radii, revealing star formation histories of the central galaxy, its satellites, and its streams while mapping the dark matter halo and charting assembly from the cosmic web.

The planned tools will build mock Roman imaging from numerical simulations to test model predictions and to optimize observing strategies. With powerful planning tools, Roman will improve current sample sizes of resolved star maps a hundredfold and reach surface brightness limits comparable to those currently reached only in the Local Group and more than four magnitudes fainter than achievable from the ground.

Roman can resolve individual stars to map galaxy structure down to an equivalent surface brightness of 35 mag/sqarcsec for any galaxy within 10 Mpc of the Sun.

roman, wide field, near infrared, nearby galaxies, resolved stars, dark matter, star formation, numerical simulations, mock imaging, surface brightness