Europeans launch mission to decipher ‘dark’ content of the Universe – 7/1/2023 – Sidereal Messenger
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About 95% of the Universe’s content is made up of two things that science doesn’t yet know what they are. For lack of how to describe them, they are called dark matter and dark energy. And now the ESA (European Space Agency) has just launched a mission dedicated to specifically exploring these mysteries.
This is the Euclid space telescope, launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, at 12:12 pm (Brasília time) this Saturday (1st). By installing itself in its heliocentric orbit (that is, around the Sun) 1.5 million km from Earth (in the same region where other astronomical satellites are located, including the James Webb Space Telescope), it will have the mission of observing about a third of the sky, escaping only the most luminous areas of the Milky Way’s belt and the plane of the Solar System, over the course of six years.
The goal is to map the large-scale structure of the Universe, that is, how galaxies, their clusters and superclusters are distributed from here to the depths of space, forming the so-called cosmic web. This, by the way, explains the name of the mission: as the distribution of matter and energy is associated with the geometry of space-time, the decision came to name the spacecraft after Euclid, the Greek mathematician who founded this area of study in the 17th century. 3 BC
Over the course of six years, the expectation is that Euclid, with its 1.2-meter primary mirror, will register more than 12 billion galaxies, covering around 10 billion years of cosmic history (recall that the deeper you look , older is the light that now reaches us, which makes observing distant galaxies equivalent to seeing them as they were billions of years ago).
It is an effort to map the visible in detail to try to understand the invisible. Euclid has two instruments, the VIS, which is essentially a visible light camera, and the Nisp, a near-infrared photometer and imaging spectrometer. With the VIS, the telescope will be able to detect the gravitational lenses that denounce the presence of dark matter, since it is known precisely by the gravity it exerts, even though it is invisible. Nisp will be able to estimate the distance and speed of separation of galaxies, allowing the creation of a 3D map of the cosmos – an essential tool for deciphering dark energy, perceived only by its effect of accelerating the expansion of the Universe.
The project, which cost €1.4 billion, aims to deepen, from a privileged platform in space, far from the effects of the Earth’s atmosphere on observation, initiatives conducted on the ground, such as the DES (Dark Energy Survey, or Dark Energy), which has similar goals. Who knows, with the 170 million gigabytes of data that Euclid will generate, answers on the composition of the dark 95% of the Universe will emerge? Either way, we’ll learn important details about the evolution of the cosmos over the past 10 billion years, and clues to how it will continue to transform in the future.
This column is published on Mondays in the printed version, in Folha Corrida.
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