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The powerful Euclidean telescope has captured a dazzling new mosaic of millions of stars and galaxies. And that’s just the first piece of the huge puzzle the observatory is designed to solve.
A European Space Agency mission launching in July 2023 will create the largest and most accurate 3D map of the universe to date, helping to answer persistent questions about the “dark side” of the universe.
Scientists assembled the first part of the map, containing 208 gigapixels, from 260 observations made between March 25 and April 8. But that was only a small part of Euclid’s future extensive survey of the sky, measuring its shape. , the distances and motions of billions of galaxies.
The mosaic, which includes about 100 million stars and galaxies, was unveiled for the first time on October 15 at the International Astronomical Congress in Milan, Italy.
“This stunning image is the first part of a map that will reveal more than a third of the sky in six years’ time. It’s only 1% of the map, but it’s the first part of the map that will help scientists describe the universe. It is packed with a variety of information sources that can help us discover new ways to do things,” said Valeria Petrino, ESA’s Euclid project scientist, in a statement.
One of Euclid’s main goals is to observe dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter has never been detected, but it is thought to make up 85% of all matter in the universe. Dark energy, on the other hand, is a mysterious force that is thought to play a role in the accelerated expansion of the universe.
Astronomers hope that the telescope’s observations of millions of galaxies will reveal the hidden forces that give the universe its structure and drive its mysterious acceleration.
Euclid’s wide field of view allows it to record data from a part of the sky 100 times larger than what NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s cameras can capture. But the telescope’s sensitive camera can also capture intricate details of many celestial objects at once.
For example, the delicate structures of spiral galaxies in the galaxy cluster Abel 3381, located 470 million light-years away, can be seen in the mosaic, as well as the light blue clouds between the stars of the Milky Way.
These “galactic cirrus clouds” get their name from their resemblance to cirrus clouds on Earth, but they are a mixture of gas and dust, and Euclid was able to capture their faint appearance with a visible-light camera. Masu.
The first images of Euclid were released in November 2023, but the telescope began observing the sky regularly in February. So far, the observatory has completed 12% of the survey.
“We have already seen beautiful, high-resolution images of individual objects and groups of objects from Euclid, and this new image finally gives us a taste of the vastness of the sky covered by Euclid. , this will enable detailed measurements of billions of galaxies,” said Jason Rose, an observational cosmologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. , in a statement. Rose is Euclid’s U.S. Science Director and principal investigator on NASA’s Euclid Dark Energy Science Team.
In the 1920s, astronomers Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe has been expanding ever since its creation 13.8 billion years ago. But research beginning in the 1990s suggests that something triggered an acceleration in the expansion of the universe about 6 billion years ago, and the cause remains a mystery.
Uncovering the true nature of dark energy and dark matter will help astronomers understand what the universe is made of, how its expansion has changed over time, and how gravity It might help you understand if there’s more to it than what you’re seeing. Dark matter and dark energy are also thought to play a role in the distribution and movement of objects such as galaxies and stars throughout the universe.
Euclid is designed to observe billions of galaxies 10 billion light-years away, revealing how matter has been stretched and pulled apart by dark energy over time. These observations effectively allow Euclid to see how the universe has evolved over the past 10 billion years.
During its observations, the telescope will catalog 1.5 billion galaxies and the stars within them, collecting a treasure trove of data for astronomers, including the mass of each galaxy and the number of stars produced each year.
Euclid’s first image is a promising glimpse of a broader map that will be revealed in the future.
“What’s really surprising about these new images is the sheer range of physical scales,” Mike Seifert, JPL’s project scientist for NASA’s Euclid contribution, said in a statement. . “These images capture details ranging from star clusters near individual galaxies to some of the largest structures in the universe. We are confident that the complete Euclid data will be available when the main survey is completed. We’re starting to see the first hints of what it’s going to look like.”
