- Jonathan Amos
- Science Correspondent – BBC News
Image copyright ESA
It took 10 years for the European Space Agency to build the €1.4 billion Euclid telescope to study dark energy.
The European Space Telescope Euclid, or “Euclide,” is set to launch from the US Air Force Base in Florida in an attempt to solve one of the biggest questions perplexing science: What is the universe made of?
Euclid’s primary task was to create a massive 3D map of the universe, an attempt to relate certain properties of dark matter and dark energy.
Together, these phenomena control the shape and expansion of everything we see out there (the universe).
Researchers admit they know nothing about these phenomena.
Dark matter or dark energy cannot be directly detected.
Professor Isobel Hook says this huge gap in knowledge means we can’t really explain our origins.
An astronomer at Lancaster University in Britain believes that looking through Euclid is your best bet to get on the path to understanding.
He told BBC News: “It’s like getting on a ship before people knew where the Earth was in different directions. So we’re going to map the universe to understand where we are, how we got here – how we are as a whole. The universe came up from the point of the Big Bang. The beauty that we see around us. Galaxies, as well as the solar system until we reach the origin of life.
Image copyright NASA/ESA/R.MASSEY/CALTECH
While the Hubble telescope mapped dark matter to a small area of the sky, Euclid mapped it to a third of the sky.
The €1.4 billion Euclid telescope is set to launch from Cape Canaveral on a Falcon 9 rocket at 11:12 local time (15:12 GMT).
Euclid will be sent to an observatory 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the farthest planet from the Sun.
Although the mission is primarily an ESA project, the mission also includes important science and engineering contributions from NASA.
How would Euclid explore the dark universe?
Previous experiments have shown that dark energy accounts for 70 percent of all energy in the universe, with the remaining 30 percent represented by dark matter, 25 percent, and 5 percent represented by stars, gas, dust, planets, and humans. , from this universe.
Therefore, 95 percent of the universe is represented by dark energy and dark matter, mysterious substances, and to understand the nature of these mysterious substances, Euclid will survey the universe twice in six years.
The first major task was to map the distribution of dark matter, matter that cannot be directly detected but that astronomers can see because of its gravitational influence.
Image copyright CEA
VIS is one of the largest camera instruments Euclid has sent into space
For example, galaxies cannot maintain their shape without some additional scaffolding. This scaffold must be dark matter, whatever it is.
Although the object cannot be seen directly, the telescope can map its distribution and look for how the object’s mass affects the light from distant galaxies.
The Hubble Space Telescope is famous for being the first to use this method to identify a dark object in a small area of the sky that was only two square degrees.
But the Euclid telescope will perform the same task as Hubble, but over 15,000 square degrees of sky, more than a third of the sky.
At the heart of it all is the telescope’s British-built VIS Main View camera.
Mark Cropper, a professor at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at the University of California, Los Angeles, said: “The images (this camera) produces are enormous. You’d need more than 300 high-definition TVs to display just one image. .”
Dark energy is a completely different concept from dark matter.
This mysterious “force” accelerates the expansion of the universe. In 1998 three scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in recognition of its presence and influence.
Image copyright NASA/ESA/CSA/STSCI
Euclid will measure the precise locations of two billion galaxies about 10 billion light-years from Earth.
Euclid would investigate this phenomenon by drawing three-dimensional distribution maps of galaxies.
Patterns in the large gaps between these dimensions can be used as a kind of ‘gauge’ to measure expansion through time.
Again, observations from Earth have succeeded in pinpointing dark energy in small-scale galaxies, but the Euclid telescope will measure the exact locations of about 2 billion galaxies 10 billion light-years from Earth.
Professor Bob Nicholl, from the University of Surrey, said scientists “can then ask some interesting questions”.
He told BBC News: “Is the acceleration the same at all points in the universe? Today, we’re averaging everything we measure. But what if the acceleration there isn’t here? That would be a scientific discovery.”
Euclid cannot say definitively, “This is the nature of dark matter and dark energy,” but what he is doing is summarizing the paradigms and ideas that dominate current scientific thought. This will help focus the attention and efforts of theorists and experimenters.
Image copyright ESA
It took Euclid six years to map a third of the sky in three dimensions
For example, it could provide some new insights into how to detect particles currently thought to make up the bulk of dark matter.
As for dark energy, Euclid’s study could tell scientists that there is a better explanation for this unknown force based on a modified theory than current scientific best guesses, rather than a fundamental property of the void in space. Gravity. This would also be a scientific discovery.
Professor Mark McGreen, ESA’s senior advisor for science and exploration, said one possibility is that dark energy is actually a fifth force, “a new force in the universe that only works on large scales, so it doesn’t affect life on Earth.”
“But, of course, this could greatly affect the fate of our universe, so how far will it expand? Will it continue to accelerate forever and keep getting bigger? Or maybe it will collapse back in?” McCaughrean said.
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