Kaleidoscope
Science and technology
The European Space Agency has posted the first data from the Euclid telescope.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has released the first five images taken by the Euclid telescope. Let us recall that the main mission of the device is to study the dark matter of the Universe.
How reports Russian Traveler publication, the photographs taken before the start of the main scientific work are fascinating. The images show large areas of the sky previously unseen by human eyes.
Scientists explain that, according to modern astronomical data, the visible part of matter is a small fraction of what exists. It is assumed that 95% of the Universe in which man exists consists of dark energy and matter.
Studying this invisible component of space is considered the main goal of the ESA mission, which will last six years. It is planned to study one third of the sky, for which instruments of unprecedented precision will be used.
The authors believe that scientists have hope that knowledge about the structure of celestial bodies and their interactions with each other will allow us to better understand the nature and distribution of dark matter and energy.
The scientific mission of Euclid, which was launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on July 1 of this year, will not begin for several months. This time period was required to perform difficult orbital maneuvers and reach the Lagrange point 2 (L2). It also takes time to calibrate and test on-board instruments.
During the tests, the first frames were obtained. These include images of the Perseus galaxy cluster: thousands of galaxies nearly 240 million light-years from Earth. Another 100,000 galaxies are visible in the background.
Researchers believe that understanding what causes such clusters can only be explained by the nature of dark matter, which, according to mission employee Carol Mundell, “brings galaxies closer together and makes them spin faster.”
“Dark energy is the driving force behind the accelerating expansion of the universe,” she says.
Mundell added that Euclid will, for the first time, allow cosmologists to explore dark secrets and make breakthroughs in our understanding of the cosmos as a whole.
“These precise images show that the mission will help answer one of the greatest mysteries of modern physics,” the scientist concludes.
Previously, Topnews wrote that astronomers have shown the oldest black hole in the Universe.
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