2023-07-01 15:28:00
On Saturday (July 1), Musk’s SpaceX rocket will launch in Florida, carrying the European Space Agency (ESA) Euclid (Euclid) space telescope, designed to explore the dark universe and reveal dark energy and dark matter. Big mysterious cosmic phenomenon. (Handout/European Space Agency/AFP)
[The Epoch Times, July 1, 2023](Comprehensive report by Epoch Times reporter Xia Yu) On Saturday (July 1), Musk’s SpaceX rocket was launched in Florida, carrying the European Space Agency (ESA) Euclid The (Euclid) space telescope aims to explore the dark universe and reveal the two mysterious cosmic phenomena of dark energy and dark matter.
The telescope, named Euclid following the ancient Greek mathematician “Father of Geometry,” was strapped into the cargo bay of a Falcon 9 rocket and was launched at around 11 a.m. ET on Saturday in Florida, Florida. Successful launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.
The new insights gained from the $1.4 billion mission, which is expected to last at least six years, are expected to change astrophysics and perhaps the understanding of the nature of gravity.
If all goes according to plan, Euclid will embark on a month-long voyage following a brief spaceflight to reach his destination nearly 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth in orbit around the sun, the distance between Earth and the sun. The position where the gravitational force is stable is called the second Lagrangian point or L2.
From there, Euclid aims to explore the evolution of what astrophysicists call the “Dark Universe,” using wide-field telescopes to span the Milky Way and explore galaxies 10 billion light-years from Earth in the vast expanse of space.
The two-ton spacecraft is also equipped with instruments to measure the infrared light intensity and spectrum of these galaxies to precisely determine their distances from Earth.
The Euclid Space Telescope was entirely designed and built by ESA, and NASA provided the photodetectors for its near-infrared instrument. The Euclid Consortium consists of more than 2,000 scientists from 13 European countries, the United States, Canada and Japan. (Valery Hache/AFP)
The mission focuses on two fundamental building blocks of the dark universe, two “dark” components that make up more than 95 percent of the universe’s total mass-energy, but are invisible to humans and poorly understood regarding their composition, whereas we can see Ordinary matter only accounts for 5%. Astronomers infer the existence of dark matter from the behavior of human-visible matter, which acts as an additional source of gravity that holds everything together; dark energy accelerates the expansion of the universe.
The Euclid Space Telescope was entirely designed and built by ESA, and NASA provided the photodetectors for its near-infrared instrument. The Euclid Consortium consists of more than 2,000 scientists from 13 European countries, the United States, Canada and Japan.
After a decade in the making, the mission initially flew into space on a Russian Soyuz rocket. But when the war in Ukraine broke out, and because Europe’s Ariane rocket program was not immediately available, the launch plan turned to Elon Musk’s SpaceX.
After a decade in the making, the mission initially flew into space on a Russian Soyuz rocket. But when the war in Ukraine broke out, and because Europe’s Ariane rocket program was not immediately available, the launch plan turned to Elon Musk’s SpaceX. (Gregg Newton/AFP)
NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, launched late last year, has allowed astronomers to probe the early universe with unprecedented clarity, while Euclid aims to reveal the hidden structure and structure of the universe by carefully mapping the vast array of observable objects. mechanics.
Dark matter and dark energy cannot be detected directly, but their properties are “encoded in the galaxies’ shape and position”.
“Measuring the shape and position of galaxies allows us to infer the properties of dark matter and dark energy,” Rhodes said Friday.
Euclid has two scientific instruments on board: a visible-light camera to measure the shape of the galaxy, and a near-infrared detector to measure the brightness and distance of the galaxy. The telescope plans to survey a vast expanse of space, cataloging the universe’s 1 billion galaxies in more than a third of the sky. The telescope will stare outward, taking you back to a time in the universe that astronomers call “cosmic noon,” when most stars were forming.
Observing subtle but noticeable changes in the shape and position of galaxies over vast scales of time and space will reveal subtle changes in the acceleration of the universe, and thus indirectly expose the power of dark energy, scientists say.
Euclid will also help researchers map the distribution of dark matter by measuring the “gravitational lensing effect,” which produces faint distortions in the visible shapes of galaxies, and which, due to the presence of invisible matter, distorts the its surrounding spatial structure. Another class of maps uses baryonic acoustic oscillations, the regular periodic density fluctuations of the visible baryonic matter in the universe.
Through a better understanding of dark energy and matter, scientists hope to better understand the formation and distribution of galaxies in the cosmic web.
Astronomer Yannick Mellier, head of the Euclid Consortium and an astronomer at the Institute for Astrophysics in Paris, said that in addition to Euclid’s main goal, it will, within a few decades, provide All astronomy domains provide a gold mine.
Responsible editor: Li Huanyu#
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