European Space Agency To Investigate Dark Energy and Dark Matter With Euclid Space Telescope

Dark energy and dark matter are mysteries in life that the European Space Agency now wants to explore. For the first time, the ESA launched a mission exploring the two topics.

ESA's New Mission

According to Phys.org, the ESA's new mission to investigate dark energy and matter involves its Euclid space telescope being blasted into space. This happened on Saturday as Euclid took off on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

The launch happened at 15:12 GMT at Cape Canaveral, Florida, and was able to successfully emit its first signal upon schedule after its separation from the rocket. Josef Aschbacher, Director General of the ESA, said he was thrilled and excited about the launch.

The decision to launch the Euclid via Elon Musk's SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket comes as they decided against using the Russian Soyuz rockets in response to the war in Ukraine and related sanctions. Carole Mundell, science director of the ESA, described the launch as "perfect" while saying the journey has just begun.

Euclid to Join the James Webb Telescope

An article by PBS reports that it could take a month to get to the James Webb Telescope and another two months before it starts its survey. As such, Euclid is expected to conduct a six-year survey starting this fall.

Euclid is expected to reach Lagrange Point over 930,000 miles from Earth to join the James Webb telescope. When reaching the hovering spot, Euclid will start charting the universe's largest-ever map.

The map to be drawn would stretch two billion galaxies and cover over a third of the sky. Such charting would be carried out by capturing light that reached Earth's vicinity, specifically those that took 10 billion years.

The map also aims to offer a new perspective on the universe's history, estimated at 13.8 billion years old. Mundell said that the mission would be to be able to unravel what lies in the "Dark Universe."

Knowing the Universe

The mission aims to provide a solution to an issue described as a "cosmic embarrassment" by Giuseppe Racca, who is the project manager. Such statements referred to the fact that most of the universe remains unknown.

Estimations are that only 5% of the universe is known to humanity, while the remaining 95% remains a mystery. Space reports that Euclid's mission is to investigate dark energy's nature, referring to the hypothetical "anti-gravity" force long proposed by scientists to explain the universe's expansion rate.

Euclid's goal is to map 36% of the observable sky. René Laureijs, a Euclid mission project scientist, described the telescope as a "dark energy detector."

The mission's expectation is that Euclid would cover 15,000 square degrees of the sky. With the data, scientists want to look at eons of expansions to find the origin point of when dark energy started accelerating the cosmos.

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