This article was originally published on The conversation. The publication contributed the article to Space.com’s Expert Voices: Op-Ed & Insights.
The European Space Agency (ESA) euclid satellite completed the first part of its long journey into space on May 1, 2023, when arrived in Florida on a ship from Italy. It is scheduled to take off in a Falcon 9 rocketbuilt by SpaceX, from Cape Canaveral in early July.
Euclid is designed to give us a better understanding of the “mystery” components of our universe, known as dark matter and dark energy.
Unlike the normal stuff we experience here in LandDark matter does not reflect or emit light. It unites galaxies and is believed to make up about 80% of all the mass in the universe. We have known about it for a century, but its true nature remains an enigma.
Dark energy is equally puzzling. Astronomers have shown that the expansion of the universe for the last five billion years has been Accelerating faster than expected. many believe this acceleration it is powered by an invisible force, which has been called dark energy. This constitutes approximately 70% of the energy in the universe.
Euclid will map this “dark universe”, using a suite of scientific instruments to shed light on different aspects of dark energy and dark matter.
A light in the dark
After launch, Euclid will embark on a month-long journey to a region in space called the second Earth-Sun. lagrange pointwhich is five times further from us than Moon. It is where the gravitational attraction of Sun and Land balance and provides a stable vantage point for Euclid to look at the universe. Euclid will join the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at this point and will be the perfect companion to that amazing space observatory.
My involvement with Euclid began in 2007 when ESA invited me to participate in an independent concept advisory team to evaluate two competing mission proposals called SPACE and DUNE.
Both used different techniques and therefore different instruments to study the dark universe, and ESA was struggling to decide between them. Both were compelling concepts, and our team decided that both had merit, especially in providing vital cross-checking between them. euclid was like that born from the best of both concepts.
Euclid is designed to study the entire universe, so it needs instruments with wide fields of view. The wider the field of view of the imaging instrument, the more of the universe you can see. To do this, Euclid uses a relatively small telescope compared to JWST. In size, Euclid is about the size of a truck compared to the airplane-sized JWST. But Euclid also carries some of the largest digital cameras deployed in space with fields of view hundreds of times greater than JWST’s.
forms and colors
He Euclid VIS (or visible) instrumentBuilt primarily in the UK, it is designed to measure the positions and shapes of as many galaxies as possible to look for subtle correlations in this data caused by the gravitational lensing of light as it travels towards us through dark matter. intermediate. This gravitational lensing effect is weak, only one part in a hundred thousand for most galaxies, so many galaxies are required to see the effect in high definition. Thus, VIS will produce hubble telescope-as the image quality of more than a third of the night sky.
VIS, however, cannot measure the colors of objects. This is necessary to measure your distance across the redshift effect, where the light from those objects is shifted to longer or redder wavelengths in a way that is related to their distance from us. Some of this data will need to come from existing and planned ground-based observatories, but Euclid also carries the NISP (Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer) instrument that is specifically designed to measure infrared colors and spectra, and therefore redshiftsfor the most distant galaxies that Euclid will see.
To measure dark energy, NISP will exploit a relatively new technique called Baryon acoustic oscillations (BAOs) which provides an accurate measure of the expansion history of the universe during its last 10 billion years. That history is vital for testing possible dark energy models, including suggested modifications for Einstien’s theory of general relativity.
Treasure
Such an experiment requires an army of scientists, and not all of them work solely on dark matter and dark energy. Like JWST, Euclid will be a treasure trove of new discoveries in many areas of astronomy. The Euclid consortium needs hundreds of people to help develop the sophisticated software needed to merge space data with terrestrial data and extract, with great precision, the shapes and colors of billions of galaxies.
This software has also been tested and verified using some of the largest simulations of the universe ever built. After arriving at L2, Euclid will undergo several months of testing, validation, and calibration to ensure that the instruments and telescope are performing as expected. We’re all familiar with that nervous wait after the recent release of JWST.
Once it’s ready, Euclid will embark on a five-year survey of 15,000 square degrees of the sky with some 2,000 scientists from around the world collecting results along the way. However, the true power of Euclid will only be realized once we have all this data together and carefully analyze it. That could take another five years, taking us into the next decade before we have our final dark answers. So the SpaceX launch only feels like the halfway point in the Euclid story.
I’m traveling to Florida this summer to see the launch of Euclid. I will be joined by hundreds of my colleagues who have dedicated their careers to building this amazing telescope and experimenting. Seeing the project come together in this way makes me proud to call myself “Euclidean”.
This article is republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the Original article.
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