From strange worlds to rare planets: Nasa’s Roman Telescope begins its cosmic hunt

Nasa's newest flagship space observatory, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, blasted off from Florida on Sunday on a mission to search for planets beyond the Solar System and investigate some of the universe's biggest mysteries, including dark matter and dark energy.A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket carrying the roughly $4.3 billion telescope lifted off shortly after daybreak from Nasa's Kennedy Space Centre.The bus-sized observatory is now headed towards Lagrange Point 2, an observation point about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometres) from Earth that is also home to the James Webb Space Telescope.Roman is expected to take more than three months to reach its destination.A wider view of the universeNamed after the late Nancy Grace Roman, Nasa's first chief astronomer, the telescope is designed to survey the universe at unprecedented speed and scale.“It’s going to find thousands of supernovae, tens of thousands of planets, billions of galaxies and tens of…