Bart Salazar & Brad Devowe
Community contributors to Roman-era science infrastructure
The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will transform time-domain astronomy in the Galactic bulge, enabling a large-scale census of isolated stellar remnants—including black holes, neutron stars, and free-floating planets—through microlensing and astrometric measurements.
This project argues that three carefully curated historical datasets, ingested into the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes (MAST), could provide the temporal, astrometric, and parallax context Roman needs to convert detections into stronger physical measurements.
Candidate identification and astrometric context for rare, long-duration events, including possible black-hole and neutron-star lenses.
Historical parallax measurements from a unique space-based observing geometry that can complement Roman astrometry.
Long-baseline and high-cadence light curves intended to improve temporal completeness and anomaly recovery.
Microlensing is fundamentally time-integrated. No single observation or archive contains every quantity needed to constrain lens mass, distance, and velocity. Connecting historical surveys with Roman-era observations could make archival data an active component of discovery rather than passive storage.
This repository presents a community-authored research concept and infrastructure proposal. It is not an official NASA, STScI, MAST, Roman mission, OGLE, KMTNet, Gaia, or Spitzer publication, endorsement, or data release.
Scientific claims, estimates, and proposed workflows should be independently reviewed and validated before research or operational use.
This is a source-visible, all-rights-reserved project. It is not released under the MIT License.
Public access permits viewing, discussion, citation, and evaluation subject to applicable law. It does not grant permission to reproduce, redistribute, adapt, commercialize, train AI systems on, or create derivative works from the repository.
See repository-standard/LICENSE, COPYRIGHT.md, AI_POLICY.md, and ATTRIBUTION.md.
Created by Bart Salazar and Brad Devowe. Repository direction and presentation maintained through Bart Salazar / Simple Minds Studios.