Scientists from the European Space Agency announced that the Euclid mission was able to successfully capture the first test images, which were accurate and clear enough to indicate that the space telescope will achieve its goals, and will begin to achieve them within a few weeks.
According to an official press release issued by the agency, preliminary tests were conducted to confirm the accuracy of two tools, both of which use a mirror with a diameter of 1.2 meters. For the mission, it has very high efficiency, low noise and good radiation tolerance, and has an imaging capacity of 600 megapixels.
The second instrument is the Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP), which consists of a mosaic of 16 near-infrared detectors that provide accurate distance measurements for more than a billion galaxies with an accuracy 10 times better than optical measurements. usual.
Image taken by the Visible-Light Instrument (VIS) (European Space Agency)
targets in the dark universe
These two tools are intended to fulfill Euclid’s primary mission, which is to find out whether or not dark energy is real. Dark energy is an entity that scientists hypothesize is causing the expansion of the universe to accelerate. To understand the matter, imagine that you are throwing a ball to the sky. It is supposed to stand up shortly and return to you thanks to gravity, but what if you discover that the farther it is from you, the faster it will rise.
In this case, you will assume that there is something invisible pushing the ball, and this is how scientists imagine the state of the universe, as it was supposed to calm down in its expansion after the Big Bang for a while, but on the contrary it accelerates, which indicates the existence of something hidden that pushes it to accelerate, this thing is dark energy.
The Euclid mission will also attempt to test other hypotheses for this acceleration, including that Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity could be wrong on large scales, or that the universe is less dense or uniformly distributed than current theories suggest, hypotheses that successfully deny the existence of dark energy.
In addition, the mission aims to explore one of the other secrets of the universe, which is dark matter, that matter that scientists cannot monitor, but they monitor its gravitational effect on its surroundings, as it appears to scientists that galaxies appear (in their observations of their speed) heavier than they appear, which means the presence of a component Invisible to her, this component is dark matter.
Dark matter and energy represent 95% of the composition of this universe, and only 5% remains for what we know, and it represents the matter of galaxies, stars, planets and everything, down to the tools we use daily and those that make up our bodies.
Euclid launched into space on the first of last July on board the “Falcon 9” rocket, and it almost reached the target region by the first of August. This region is the “second Lagrange” point at an average distance of 1.5 million kilometers outside Earth’s orbit. (the same point where James Webb stands), and the new telescope is expected to operate there for at least 6 years.
