With the Euclid space telescope, Europe plunges into the dark side of the Universe

2023-06-30 22:01:34
Par Tristan Vey

Posted 4 hours ago, Just Updated

On June 27, the last glimpse of ESA’s Euclid space telescope before its installation in the fairing of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. ESA/SpaceX

DECRYPTION – The European Space Agency is launching a satellite worth more than 1 billion euros on Saturday to try to unravel the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy, two fundamental unknowns in cosmology.

At the beginning of the 20th century, thanks to the observations of the American astronomer Edwin Hubble and the theoretical work of the Belgian Georges Lemaître, humanity discovered that the Universe was expanding. It is a major scientific and philosophical revolution. Not only is the frame of the Universe not static and immutable but it suggests, by rewinding the film in reverse, that all matter was once concentrated in a single point, that there was a beginning.

A “big bang” as the British astrophysicist Fred Hoyle would scornfully call it, who considered the idea absurd. Ironically, the term coined in 1950 has stuck and greatly contributed to popularizing Abbé Lemaître’s “primitive atom theory”. Surprisingly, Einstein’s equations of general relativity, established in 1915, quite naturally predicted this dynamic Universe. But the brilliant German physicist had preferred to artificially add a term called “cosmological constant”…

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