The European Space Agency (ESA) released the first photos captured by the Euclid telescope, which are stunning.
ESA's Euclid Telescope Captures Beautiful Shots of Galaxies
The European Space Agency's Euclid project, launched last year, seeks to unravel the mysteries of dark matter and energy. These two components make up most of the known universe but are mainly unknown due to their difficulty to study. Because dark matter does not interact with light, scientists cannot witness it directly but can infer its existence from its gravitational effects, for example.
The answer is to utilize a susceptible instrument such as Euclid to observe far-off galaxies and determine the impact of dark matter on them. As a result, photos obtained from spacecraft display exceptional detail across a vast swath of the sky and are four times sharper than those obtained from ground-based telescopes.
They display galaxy clusters, star-forming areas, and the huge neighboring spiral galaxy NGC 6744 using data from a mere twenty-four-hour observation period.
Valeria Pettorino and René Laureijs, Euclid project scientists at the European Space Agency, stated that the initial photographs from Euclid had surpassed their expectations. Data from a single day's observations has already shown millions of distinct objects. Euclid will examine a third of the sky over the following six years, allowing it to uncover even more of the cosmos.
What's Next For Euclid Telescope
Researchers are hopeful to discover more about the universe and other celestial bodies using the Euclid telescope.
"We have to accurately measure the shapes of over 1.5 billion distant galaxies," Pettorino and Laureijs said.
These galaxies can be small and fragile, and the atmosphere of Earth blurs them when viewed from Earth. However, because it is positioned above the atmosphere in space, there is less interference while detecting and measuring these galaxies.
The telescope will yield information on other celestial objects and provide meticulous measurements of galaxies for studying dark matter.
According to the duo, using Euclid will also enable them to look for objects that were extremely challenging to identify previously, such as free-floating planets, ultra-cold stars, brown dwarfs, galaxies with extremely low surface brightness, or very high redshift quasar populations.
"Euclid may also reveal new objects which have never been observed before," they said.
What Is Euclid?
Euclid is named after the Greek mathematician of Alexandria, who invented geometry. Since the quantity of matter and energy is connected to the geometry of the cosmos, scientists named the Euclid spacecraft after him when it was sent to study the dark universe. Euclid debuted in July 2023. At a press conference following the launch, Director-General of the European Space Agency Josef Aschbacher declared it a "fantastic launch" for insertion into orbit separation.
By examining billions of galaxies over a third of the sky, up to 10 billion light-years away, it will map the cosmos in three dimensions, with time as the third dimension. Dark energy accelerates the universe's expansion, and dark matter regulates the growth of cosmic structures, but scientists still have much to learn about these concepts.
Euclid will demonstrate how the structure has changed over cosmic history and how the universe has changed over the last 10 billion years. Astronomers can deduce more about the specific nature of dark energy, dark matter, and gravity by using these inferences.
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