Astrophysicists are interested in understanding why the cosmos is expanding so quickly. The launch of the new space telescope Euclid by the European Space Agency (ESA) is scheduled on July 1. The effort, which will include support from NASA, aims to comprehend dark energy, the mysterious source of the universe’s accelerated expansion, as well as how it affects the evolution of our cosmos.
Getting ready
The Euclid spacecraft has a 1.2-meter telescope inside and is roughly 14.5 feet (4.4 meters) long, or the length of a canoe. It will launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, atop Space X’s Falcon 9 rocket.
Euclid will set off on a course for the Sun-Earth Lagrange point L2 after taking off. (The James Webb Space Telescope revolves around here as well.) The journey to L2, which is around 930,000 miles (1.5 million kilometers) from Earth and where Euclid will face away from the Sun, will take about four weeks.
Once in orbit, mission controllers will activate Euclid’s two instruments and check their efficiency. One to three months after launch, the Euclid team will calibrate the telescope and get it ready for observation
The project will observe billions of galaxies out to a distance of 10 billion light-years in order to produce the largest and most precise 3D image of the universe. A total of more than a third of the sky will be covered by Euclid. With the help of these data, scientists will be able to put together how the universe’s large-scale structures have evolved through time. The project also seeks to learn more about the nature of dark energy and dark matter, as well as the place of gravity in the cosmos.
The dark universe
The universe has grown from its beginning. Researchers first believed that the gravity of materials scattered throughout space would eventually slow the expansion after learning this truth. Instead, after analyzing supernovae in the 1990s with the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers discovered that the universe’s expansion started speeding between six and eight billion years ago, though no one knows why.
Dark energy—a distinct phenomenon from dark matter—is what is causing the acceleration. This dark energy makes up about 68 percent of the universe. Euclid will study how galaxies have gathered during various cosmic eras in the universe’s history in order to find the influence of dark energy or changes in gravity’s influence over time.
On the other hand, dark matter is made up of particles and is thought to account for 27% of the universe’s total mass. Dark matter is difficult to find since it is invisible. Dark matter possesses mass and gravity, an attractive force, much like regular matter does. Therefore, astronomers can view it indirectly, such as through gravitational lensing, which is the process by which galaxy clusters bend the light of objects behind them. Researchers think dark matter supplies the extra gravity for the distortions since the amount of visible matter present in galaxy clusters is inadequate to produce the precise warping effects found. Euclid will therefore use gravitational lensing to investigate the buildup of dark matter throughout the cosmos.
Two telescopes