Unveiling the Universe’s Greatest Mystery: The Euclid Probe Explores the Dark Matter Enigma

2023-07-02 07:46:39
The Euclid probe launches into space to reveal one of the most important mysteries in astronomy The European space probe Euclid launched on Saturday aboard the Falcon 9 rocket owned by SpaceX. The probe seeks to uncover one of the most important mysteries in astronomy, represented by two mysterious dark matter that make up 95% of the universe. The two-ton probe, designed by Thales Alenia Space, will last one month to reach its final location, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, near the James Webb space telescope. It will take him another two months to begin this fall an ambitious six-year survey. From his vantage point, Euclid, named after the inventor of geometry, will draw a three-dimensional map of the universe, including two billion galaxies over a third of the planetarium. The third dimension of the map will be time. By capturing the light that took up to 10 billion years to reach us from galaxies, Euclid will delve into the distant past of the universe, which is 13.8 billion years old. The goal lies in reconstructing the history of the universe, by dividing it into “parts of time”, as the astrophysicist Yannick Millier, head of the “Euclidean” union, which includes 16 countries, explained during a press conference. The mission’s hope is that this will help reveal the traces left by dark matter and dark energy during the formation of galaxies. Dark matter and dark energy are of unknown nature, but they seem to rule a universe that is only 5% made of “normal” visible matter. This lack of knowledge has been described by Giuseppe Racca, head of the Euclid mission, as a source of “cosmic embarrassment”. Without this information, scientists cannot explain how the universe works. And about this, the scientific director of the European Space Agency, Carol Mundell, said, just before takeoff, that scientists only understand 5 percent of the universe: stars, planets and us, and the rest “is still a mysterious mystery, which is a huge frontier in modern physics, we hope it will help This task is to move it forward.” The history of the mystery dates back to the 1930s, when Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky assumed, while observing the Coma cluster of galaxies, that a large part of its mass was invisible. After about a hundred years, the existence of this missing substance, which is described as black, because it does not absorb or reflect light, has become a matter of consensus. The Euclid probe has two instruments on board: a visible-light imager (VIS) and a near-infrared spectrophotometer (NISP). According to Yannick Millier, this unprecedented mapping will constitute a “gold mine of astrophysics”, as it allows the study of the shape of galaxies, the birth of clusters, and black holes. This may help scientists finally catch up on the mysterious particles that make up dark matter that are evading detection. This European mission, at a cost of 1.5 billion euros, is expected to last until 2029 at a minimum. (Associated Press)
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