NOVEMBER 8, 2023:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Scientists on Tuesday (Nov. 7, 2023) unveiled the first pictures taken by the European space telescope Euclid, a shimmering and stunning collection of galaxies too numerous to count.
The photos were revealed by the European Space Agency, four months after the telescope launched from Cape Canaveral.
Although these celestial landscapes have been observed before by the Hubble Space Telescope and others, Euclid’s snapshots provide “razor-sharp astronomical images across such a large patch of the sky, and looking so far into the distant universe,” the agency said.
In one picture, Euclid captured a group shot of 1,000 galaxies in a cluster 240 million light-years away, against a backdrop of more than 100,000 galaxies billions of light-years away. A light-year is 5.8 trillion miles.
“Dazzling,” said the space agency’s science director, Carole Mundell, as she showed off the galaxy cluster shot on a large screen at the control center in Germany.
Euclid’s instruments are sensitive enough to pick up the smallest galaxies, which were too faint to see until now. The results are “crystal-clear and stunning images going back in cosmic time,” Mundell said.
The telescope snapped pictures of a relatively close spiral galaxy that is a ringer for our own Milky Way. Although the Hubble Space Telescope previously observed the heart of this galaxy, Euclid’s shot reveals star formation across the entire region, scientists said.
Euclid also took fresh photos of the Horsehead Nebula in the constellation Orion, a dramatic nursery of baby stars made famous by Hubble. It took Euclid just an hour to capture the nebula’s latest beauty shot; the five new photos accounted for less than a day of observing time.
By measuring the shape and movement of galaxies as far as 10 billion light-years away, astronomers hope to learn more about the dark energy and matter that make up 95% of the universe.
The observatory will survey billions of galaxies over the next six years, creating the most comprehensive 3D map of the cosmos ever made. NASA is a partner in the $1.5 billion mission and supplied the telescope’s infrared detectors.
Launched in July, Euclid orbits the sun some 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth. The telescope is named after the mathematician of ancient Greece.
JULY 1, 2023:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — A European space telescope blasted off Saturday (July 1, 2023) on a quest to explore the mysterious and invisible realm known as the dark universe.
SpaceX launched the European Space Agency’s Euclid observatory toward its ultimate destination 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away, the Webb Space Telescope’s neighborhood. It will take a month to get there and another two months before it starts its ambitious six-year survey this fall.
Flight controllers in Germany declared success nearly an hour into the flight, applauding and shouting “Yes!” as the telescope phoned home after a smooth liftoff.
“I’m so thrilled, I’m so excited to see now this mission up in space, knowing it is on its way,” the European Space Agency’s director general, Josef Aschbacher, said from the Florida launch site.
Named for antiquity’s Greek mathematician, Euclid will scour billions of galaxies covering more than one-third of the sky. By pinpointing the location and shape of galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away — almost all the way back to the cosmos-creating Big Bang — scientists hope to glean insight into the dark energy and dark matter that make up most of the universe and keep it expanding.
Scientists understand only 5 percent of the universe: stars, planets, us. The rest is “still a mystery and an enigma, a huge frontier in modern physics that we hope this mission will actually help to push forward,” the European Space Agency’s science director, Carole Mundell, said just before liftoff.
The telescope’s highly anticipated 3D map of the cosmos will span both space and time in a bid to explain how the dark universe evolved and why its expansion is speeding up.
The lead scientist for the $1.5 billion mission (1.4 billion euros) said Euclid will measure dark energy and dark matter with unprecedented precision.
“It’s more than a space telescope, Euclid. It’s really a dark energy detector,” Rene Laureijs noted.
Fifteen feet (4.7 meters) tall and almost as wide, Euclid sports a 1.2-meter (4-foot) telescope and two scientific instruments capable of observing the cosmos in both visible light and the near infrared. A huge sunshield is designed to keep the sensitive systems at the properly frigid temperatures.
NASA, which contributed Euclid’s infrared detectors, has its own mission coming up to better understand dark energy and dark matter: the Roman Space Telescope due to launch in 2027. The US-European Webb telescope can also join in this quest, officials said.
Euclid was supposed to launch on a Russian rocket from French Guiana in South America, Europe’s main spaceport. The European and Russian space agencies cut ties following the invasion of Ukraine last year, and the telescope switched to a SpaceX ride from Cape Canaveral. Waiting for Europe’s next-generation, yet-to-fly Ariane rocket would have meant a two-year-plus delay, according to project manager Giuseppe Racca.
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