2023-06-30 21:31:43
They tell from the European Space Agency (ESA) that for hundreds of years astronomers have tried to learn more about the light sources of the cosmos: planets, stars, galaxies and gas, to name a few.
But all that is minimal in this vast universe that is not easy to measure. To give you an idea, the ordinary matter that makes up everything we see, from stars and galaxies to planets and people, makes up only 5% of the cosmos, so what’s in the other 95%?
That is what this new telescope that will be launched into space will investigate. This is the Euclid mission that aims to discover the mysteries of the dark universe. “This eerie-sounding invisible part of the cosmos makes up more than 95% of the mass and energy in our universe.”
Euclid will create the largest and most accurate 3D map of the universe ever produced, as 95% of it appears to be made up of matter and dark energy. If there are no weather problems, it will leave this Saturday, July 1 at 4:30 p.m. from Cape Canaveral, Florida, United States (3:30 p.m. Colombian time).
“Dark matter and dark energy affect the movement and distribution of visible sources, but they do not absorb or emit light, and scientists do not yet know what kind of entities they really are. Understanding its nature continues to be, therefore, one of the most pressing challenges of cosmology and fundamental physics today,” they explained from ESA when detailing this mission.
The astronomer Mauricio Arango, planetarist at the Medellín Planetarium, clarified that although many say that Euclid is a telescope, it is much more than that, “it is an observatory, a complex laboratory that is sent into space” and that is why ESA detailed that Euclid will create the largest and most accurate 3D map of the universe: “It will observe billions of galaxies at a distance of 10 billion light-years across more than a third of the sky. With this map, Euclid will reveal how the universe has expanded and how large-scale structure has evolved during cosmic history. And from this we can learn more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.”
This observatory was not planned overnight. “These are 10-year projects that have been planned for a long time and Euclid was even ready to be sent three years ago and it was not sent because of the problem with Russia,” Arango said.
Initially, some countries of the European Union and Russia were part of this telescope, “it was going to be launched on a Russian Soyuz rocket, but due to all the problems that occurred, it was delayed and finally it is going to be launched with another sociopolitical figure who appears on the scene that is the United States. That is why the Euclid goes into space on an American rocket, the Space X Falcon 9, but it is still an ESA project”; clarified the planetarist.
Today there are 21 countries collaborating in this project that involves 300 institutions, 80 companies and 3,500 people in Belgium, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland and the United Kingdom and the United States. Joined.
It is called Euclid in honor of the Greek mathematician Euclid of Alexandria (-300 BC) “who founded the subject of geometry and worked on how the density of matter and energy is linked to the geometry of the Universe, the mission received named after him,” ESA said.
to solve mysteries
The first thing to understand is that before any mission like this, the idea of solving a scientific problem must be raised. Most of the questions that worry people have to do with the atmosphere and space, “they are questions of cosmology: How did the universe come to be? When is the universe going to end? How old is the universe?” Arango explained, adding that this Euclid thing is very different, “it has nothing to do with the atmosphere and space, it is going to inquire about matter and dark energy.”
Why are we interested in dark matter and dark energy?
They say from the ESA that scientists have discovered that the distribution and movement of objects in the universe such as stars and galaxies are affected by the presence of two invisible entities called dark matter and dark energy. “These names indicate that scientists do not know what these forms of matter and energy are. If we want to understand the universe we live in, we must learn more about the details of these ‘dark’ entities and discover their nature.”
All this will be achieved by Euclid thanks to two scientific instruments: a visible wavelength (VIS) camera and a near-infrared spectrometer and photometer (NISP). “It is designed to provide excellent quality imaging both in the visible range and in near-infrared spectroscopy and photometry,” they said from ESA.
And another important point that must be understood is its difference from the James Webb. Euclid is going to do a sweep of the sky, James Webb has given details of a galaxy, “to understand it more clearly, imagine that you have to prune a football field and you must choose whether to do it with a pruning machine or a scalpel. James Webb is a scalpel, he cannot show us a map of the entire universe, while Euclid (the pruning machine in this analogy) will do so during his years of operation, which are planned to be about six”, Arango specified.
So Euclid is not going to give results so quickly, at least in the ESA mission they detail that, four weeks after its launch, the telescope will be aligned and with all the instruments turned on and that within 3 months it will begin its study.
Patience has been a key in this research and that is why the scientific community knows that Euclid is going to provide more reliable data to corroborate the idea of how many galaxies there are in our universe, for example, but the planetarist clarifies that there are very clear limits here, “and it may be that the Euclid reveals nothing. That is a very big possibility, but as Hegel said, ‘in heaven there is always something new’. For people who have spent time studying cosmology, the fact that we see clearer images of gravitational lensing—because the Euclid is going to show us gravitational lensing that we’ve never seen before—is something unique.”
Expectations are high, and many hope that Euclid will show something revealing, something no one has seen or expected to see. “Those are the things that would surprise us and that would transform and generate a true revolution, but it will clearly show many things that we already know exist, and that will also be very important because we will corroborate theories,” concluded the planetarist.
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