- 4263 - EUCLID SPACE TELESCOPE - A new space telescope from Europe seeks to solve riddles of the universe. “Euclid” views hundreds of thousands of stars located 7,800 light-years from Earth. EU researchers expect unprecedented insights into galaxies from the study of a mysterious energy force.
---------------- 4263 - EUCLID SPACE TELESCOPE
- This powerful new
European space telescope will bring astronomers closer than ever to answering a
longstanding question: will the universe, which is expanding, do so forever?
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- Called Euclid, the
telescope was launched on July 1, 2023 and is observing the dark universe from
its vantage point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. Looking in near-infrared
and visible light, Euclid will take images of some 10 billion galaxies to
understand both dark energy, which drives the expansion of the universe, and
dark matter, which accounts for three quarters of all matter in the universe.
-
- “Dark energy” is a
mysterious force that may have been driving the expansion of the universe since
the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago. “Dark matter” is an unseen form noticed by
its gravitational effects on galaxies but never directly detected. Those are
really two mystery components in our universe.
-
- Of the mass-energy
content of the universe, 68% comes from dark energy, 27% from dark matter and
5% from ordinary matter. Ordinary matter
is what we and our world are made of.
-
- Euclid, named after
a Greek mathematician who lived around 300 BC and founded geometry, is designed
to tackle a physics challenge: to understand the structure of the universe
resulting from dark matter and dark energy since the dawn of time.
-
- It is the power of
the telescope that it will also reveal other mysteries of the universe from
studying planets orbiting distant suns to discovering objects smaller than
stars found throughout the Milky Way.
-
- “Observational
Cosmology Using Large Imaging Surveys”, or OCULIS, the five-year project began
in September 2023. Designed to
basically make a giant map of the matter distribution in the universe.
-
- Euclid will build
the map by gauging the bending of light around galaxies, a process called “weak
gravitational lensing”. This makes it possible to measure the amount of dark
matter surrounding galaxies and, by extension, its spread across the universe.
-
- The result will be
improved understanding of the links between galaxies and dark matter and of the
number of stars and volume of gas in each galaxy. A better measure of dark energy can be
obtained thanks to the sheer volume of the universe that Euclid will observe as
much in two days as the Hubble Space Telescope in its full 30 years in space.
-
- Measuring each
galaxy will offer new information about the universe's expansion rate, which is
roughly 70 kilometers per second, but appears to be getting faster as a result
of dark energy. ( This is 49,300 miles
per hour per million lightyears distance )
-
- Euclid is a fully
European mission that got underway in 2011. The original plan by the European
Space Agency, or ESA, was to launch the telescope in 2022 on a Russian
rocket. After the Russian invasion of
Ukraine in February, 2022, ESA severed
ties with Russia and the telescope was moved to a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
-
- Euclid studies the
universe with a 1.2-meter-wide primary mirror and a wide field of view. These
dimensions mean that, in every picture taken, the telescope covers an area 2.5
times larger than the size of the full moon.
-
- That's useful for
studying not just galaxies, but also much smaller objects. Euclid will hunt for objects smaller than
stars hiding in the Milky Way. Known as substellar objects, these include
bodies such as brown dwarfs, failed stars that never gained enough mass to
ignite fusion in their cores, and giant planets many times the mass of Jupiter.
-
- Telescopes like
Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope have a much narrower window of view
than Euclid. With its wider window, Euclid should be able to discover a vast
number of substellar objects. The
project's projection is 500,000 such objects within five years, 100 times more
than have been seen before.
-
- These could
include the first substellar objects that are found in the outer regions of the
Milky Way and that may have formed very early in the galaxy's 13-billion-year
history. Substellar objects are a
missing link between planets and stars.
-
- Euclid might even
be able to discover planets down to the mass of Saturn orbiting some of these
substellar objects, as well as planets floating freely in space rather than
trapped by the gravity of a star or brown dwarf.
-
- Euclid's primary
mission will last six years, with the option of extending its observations in
future. After some test images from the telescope were released in July 2023,
its full science observations are now beginning in 2026.
-
-
December 2, 2023
EUCLID SPACE
TELESCOPE 4252
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