SpaceX launched the European Space Agency's $1.5 billion Euclid space telescope Saturday, an ambitious, first-of-a-kind attempt to pin down the nature of dark matter and dark energy.
July 1, 2023 / 1:10 PMSpaceX launched the European Space Agency's $1.5 billion Euclid space telescope Saturday, an ambitious, first-of-a-kind attempt to pin down the nature of dark matter — an unknown material pervading the cosmos — and dark energy, the mysterious repulsive force that is speeding up the expansion of the universe.
Researchers have since concluded dark energy accounts for nearly three quarters of the mass-energy budget of the entire universe. Dark matter makes up about 24% of the universe, while the atoms and molecules making up normal matter — Earth, human beings, stars and galaxies — account for just 5%. At the same time, Euclid also will study the nature of dark matter, a sea of particles that do not emit or reflect light or any other electromagnetic radiation but whose gravitational effects are clearly seen. Dark matter keeps galaxies from flying apart and influences how galaxies have evolved and clustered over the 13.7 billion years since the big bang.
But if all goes well, Euclid"will directly observe the distribution of dark matter using the gravitational lensing effect that modifies the shapes of galaxies, which are deflected by all the dark matter distribution along a given line of sight," Mellier said."And that will provide the distribution of the unseen dark matter in a Euclid field."
The European Space Agency, or ESA, had been gearing up to launch the Euclid space telescope last year on a Russian Soyuz rocket taking off from Kourou, French Guiana. But in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, those plans fell apart, leaving Euclid without a ride to space. The 4,760-pound Euclid is equipped with a near-perfect 3-feet 11-inch-wide primary mirror and two instruments: a 600 megapixel visible light camera and a 64-megapixel infrared imaging spectrometer. The telescope's field of view is roughly twice the size of the full moon.
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