In July 2023, scientists launched the Euclid Space Telescope into orbit with a simple, yet enormous, task: map the dark universerevealing dark matter and energy that we can’t directly observe but that make up most of everything.
Now, scientists affiliated with the mission have published a huge amount of data that will inform how the team proceeds in trying to directly detect Dark Energy: the mysterious matter that apparently drives the accelerated expansion of the universe. (Not to be confused with dark matter, which constitutes about 27% of the cosmos.)
Euclid’s first test images were published last Augustbut his first five scientific images were released in november. Those shots, which capture some galaxy clusters, several galaxies, and an iconic nebula, are mesmerizingly beautiful, as well as containing useful data on dark energy and dark matter.
The new images are at least four times sharper than those taken with ground-based telescopes, according to a statement from the UK Space Agency, and the latest image release includes the largest images ever taken of space from space. The following images are the telescope’s first results and make up just 24 hours of Euclid observations. In other words, it’s just a preview of what scientists hope will be a prodigious portfolio of data.
Euclid’s visible imager (VIS) boasts a staggering 600 million pixels, while the infrared sensors of the telescope’s near-infrared spectrometer and photometer (NISP) add another 66 million pixels. Without needing to traverse Earth’s variable atmosphere to image the heavens (after all, it’s in them), Euclid is able to take particularly sharp images of structures deep in space.
“To achieve its primary goal of better understanding dark energy and matter, Euclid’s measurements must be exquisitely precise,” said Mark Cropper, an astrophysicist at University College London who led the development of the VIS optical camera, in the same release. “This requires a chamber. This is incredibly stable, incredibly well understood, and the internal conditions must be controlled very carefully.”
“The VIS camera we developed will not only provide beautiful images, but will also help us answer fundamental questions about the role of dark energy and matter in the evolution of the Universe,” added Cropper.
You can read all the scientific papers associated with Euclid’s early published observations. here on the Euclid website (fair warning: there are a handful of them).
Without further ado, check out Euclid’s latest images in the slides below.
