- 4589 -
EUCLID TELESCOPE - maps
the universe? - The powerful telescope has captured
millions of stars and galaxies in a mosaic that represents just the first piece
of a massive puzzle the observatory has been designed to solve. The European Space Agency mission, launched
in July 2023, will create the largest and most accurate 3D map of the universe
to help answer enduring questions about the “dark side” of the universe.
------------------- 4589 - EUCLID TELESCOPE - maps the universe?
- Scientists assembled the first piece of the
map, which includes 208 gigapixels, from 260 observations made between March 25
and April 8, 2024. But it accounts for a
tiny fraction of the broad survey that Euclid will make of the sky in the
future, measuring the shape, distance and motion of billions of galaxies.
-
- The stunning image is the first piece of a
map that in six years will reveal more than one third of the sky. This is just
1% of the map, and yet it is full of a variety of sources that will help
scientists discover new ways to describe the Universe.
-
- One of Euclid’s primary goals is to observe
dark matter and dark energy. While dark matter has never been detected, it is
believed to make up 85% of the total matter in the universe. Meanwhile, dark
energy is a mysterious force thought to play a role in the accelerating
expansion of the universe.
-
- Astronomers hope the telescope’s
observations of millions of galaxies will reveal hidden forces that provide the
universe with its structure and drive its mysterious acceleration rate. Euclid’s wide perspective can record data
from a part of the sky 100 times bigger than what NASA’s James Webb Space
Telescope’s camera can capture. The
telescope’s sensitive cameras can also capture intricate details of many
celestial objects at once.
-
- In the 1920s, astronomers Georges Lemaître
and Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe has been expanding since its
birth 13.8 billion years ago. But research that began in the 1990s has shown
that something sparked an acceleration of the universe’s expansion about 6
billion years ago, and the cause remains a mystery.
-
- Unlocking the true nature of dark energy
and dark matter could help astronomers understand what the universe is made of,
how its expansion has changed over time, and whether there is more to
understanding gravity than meets the eye. Dark matter and dark energy are also
thought to play a role in the distribution and movement of objects, such as
galaxies and stars, across the cosmos.
-
- Euclid is designed to observe billions of
galaxies that stretch 10 billion light-years away to reveal how matter may have
been stretched and pulled apart by dark energy over time. These observations
will 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 that includes each galaxy’s mass and number of
stars created per year.
-
- Euclid’s first images are a promising
glimpse of the broader map it will reveal in the future. The images capture detail from clusters of
stars near an individual galaxy to some of the largest structures in the
universe. We are beginning to see the first hints of what the full Euclid data
will look like when it reaches the completion of the prime survey.
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-
October 27, 2024 EUCLID TELESCOPE
- maps the universe? 4583
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--------------------- --- Sunday, October 27,
2024
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