Stunning photos revealed by European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope | 24CA News
At first look, the picture would not seem like a lot: just a few smatterings of brilliant, yellow stars amongst dimmer white ones. And within the centre, a smudge that seems to be a group of stars.
But zooming in reveals a completely totally different story. That smudge is not stars in any respect, however dozens upon dozens of galaxies.
This is simply one of many photographs launched by the European Space Agency, the early launch observations from their Euclid house mission.
Over six years, Euclid — which launched in July 2023 — will discover darkish matter and darkish power, two unseen components that make up most of our universe. Over that point, it’s going to observe billions of galaxies.
While these photographs — 5 in whole — are thrilling to astronomers, it is what’s forward that they are anxiously awaiting.
“These [images] are like pointing at known individual objects that are interesting,” mentioned Will Percival, director on the University of Waterloo’s Centre for Astrophysics, and one of many main science co-ordinators for the Euclid mission.
“We’ve done great science from them. But we’re going to do this everywhere; we’re going to do 15,000 square degrees, a third of the area we could possibly observe. So this is like the known knowns — the known objects in the universe. And it’s the unknown unknowns that excite me.”
Unlike the Hubble Space Telescope and the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), Euclid can survey giant elements of the sky without delay. Even although it has been working for lower than a yr, it has coated extra of the sky than both one of many different telescopes.
“Hubble and JWST are fantastic telescopes, but you’re like looking through a keyhole,” mentioned Mike Hudson, a professor on the University of Waterloo, who can be a part of the Euclid mission. “Now you’ve got a whole open window.”
Understanding our universe
What we see solely makes up roughly 5 per cent of the universe. The remainder of it’s manufactured from darkish matter (roughly 25 per cent) and darkish power (roughly 70 per cent), each of which we will not see. But we all know each exist by how they work together with different matter in our universe.
Dark matter has mass, and we are able to “see” it by the way it interacts with galaxy clusters the place it bends the sunshine of galaxies behind them, creating streaks of sunshine, as is seen within the close-up of Euclid’s picture of Abell 2390.
Dark power can be invisible, however it’s making our universe broaden quicker than as soon as thought.
“[Euclid’s] purpose is to understand, basically, what is dark matter? What is dark energy? So it’s designed to really answer two of the big questions that we have in physics and in cosmology at the moment,” Percival mentioned.
“In cosmology, we have a standard model, called the lambda CDM model — the lambda cold dark matter model — and it explains really well, pretty much everything we see. But we don’t understand the actual components in the model.”
The researchers say they hope that in its six-year mission, Euclid will change that.
“Euclid will produce the largest and also the best in the sense of the highest resolution, the least noisy map of dark matter that has ever been made. It’ll cover a third of the sky,” Hudson mentioned.
“And moreover, in addition to covering this huge area on the sky, we can also, by studying these background galaxies at different distances from us, we can actually build up a three-dimensional map of the dark matter.”
They will use the telescope to look again in time, because it takes billions of years for mild from distant galaxies to achieve us. Using Euclid, they are going to take a look at darkish matter from when the universe was a lot youthful and evaluate it to the way it was in later occasions, and even as it’s now.
Both Percival and Hudson are eagerly anticipating what the forthcoming sky survey will reveal.
“Because it’s a sky survey,” Hudson mentioned. “it will also open up huge possibilities to discover all sorts of individual interesting new things about the universe that we didn’t anticipate.”
You can study extra in regards to the Euclid mission by visiting the European Space Agency’s web site.
