‘Dark universe’ telescope Euclid opened its eyes: Here are the first photos

The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid telescope has recently sent its first images to Earth. While these eye-opening portraits are certainly fascinating, they confirm that the telescope works as expected. The Euclid telescope, on the other hand, will be one of the most important instruments sent into space by humanity and will set its sights on galaxies billions of light years away.

Euclid’s success so far is really exciting because his main goal is to map the dark side of our universe by analyzing billions of galaxies located about 10 billion light-years away. This ambitious mission aims to create a “3D” map, including time elements, to show how the realms evolve with a maturing cosmos.

Euclid opens a new era

Yannick Mellier, an astronomer at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris and leader of the Euclid Consortium, said in a statement, “The extraordinary first images obtained using Euclid’s visible and near-infrared instruments open a new era for observational cosmology and statistical astronomy. The photographs reveal the nature of dark energy. They mark the beginning of the search for

Euclid was launched on July 1 and is now hovering approximately 1.6 million km from Earth. On July 28, Euclid joined the James Webb Space Telescope at what is known as the second Lagrange point. Over the next few months, scientists will test and further calibrate the telescope.

We’ll get to what the purpose of this dark universe-hunting machine is in a moment, but first, let’s take a look at the stunning, star-studded images of Euclid.

The images you see above were taken with a tool on Euclid called the VIS, which stands for “Visible Instrument”. As the name suggests, VIS captures the universe from the human-visible part of the electromagnetic spectrum, at wavelengths between 550 and 900 nanometers. On the left you can see the full field of view of the VIS, and on the right a zoomed-in version. ESA likens the close-up field to about a quarter of the width and height of the full moon seen from Earth.

Some of the highlights in VIS’s portraits include cosmic rays shooting out of the middle of the field, lots of unmissable glowing stars, and most importantly, a few blurry spots. The ESA says these blobs are galaxies that Euclid will explore further as he develops an extremely detailed map of our universe, dark energy and all.

Next up is NISP, which stands for “Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer” by Euclid. As the ESA states, the NISP has two roles. The first can image galaxies in infrared light, or light that lies between about 950 to 2020 nanometers in the electromagnetic spectrum and is invisible to the human eye. Second, the NISP can measure exactly how much light each galaxy emits – this second part can tell us how far away those galaxies are.

The NISP images you see above are quite similar to the VIS set; the left side contains the entire area of ​​the NISP, while the right side shows a zoomed-in section. While these initial test images are not yet usable for scientific purposes, they do show that the two instruments are currently working perfectly in space.

However, deep space light captured by Euclid also passes through some wonderful filters before reaching the NISP detector. And it offers pretty great results, too. These filters can do things like measure brightness at a specific infrared wavelength, which aids NISP’s measurements of galactic distance.

Euclid has a device known as a “grism” that can basically split cosmic light into a full wavelength spectrum before sending the data to the NISP. Thanks to this process, scientists can determine, for example, how far away a particular galaxy is and what the galaxy is made of chemically.

What is the purpose of the Euclid telescope?

Dark energy and its partner, dark matter, pose some of the biggest and most fascinating questions in astronomy today. While both phenomena are invisible to the human eye, they seem to hold our universe together.

For starters, space is constantly expanding in all directions like an unstoppable bubble. But the strange thing is that this ballooning seems to be happening at speeds that scientists can’t quite explain with all the visible things in our universe. So something else must be moving to accelerate the cosmic expansion. Scientists call this “thing” dark energy.

Meanwhile, there seems to be a kind of glue inside the expanding universe that keeps the galaxies in place and determines the way they’re arranged. For example, scientists calculate that intergalactic gas and stars move as if they have extra gravity on them. This invisible “glue” is also considered dark matter.

Although the scientific world calls them “matter” or “energy”, no one knows exactly what they are made of. Scientists just use them as collective terms to describe gaps in our understanding. The only thing we know for sure right now is that the dark universe exists.

But if Euclid’s mission to map the universe perfectly over the next six years pays off, perhaps scientists will have some clues as to what the dark universe really is. Because as dark matter and energy interact with things in space, revealing the distribution and evolution of these things can show us where the dark universe is in the story.

“I am confident that the team behind the mission will succeed in using Euclid to reveal a lot about the 95 percent of the universe we currently know so little about,” ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said in a statement. When Euclid is fully calibrated, the largest ever 3D map of the sky will be created.