Interaction between two distant galaxies captured by Euclid
ESA
A mosaic of images from the European Space Agency’s Euclid Space Telescope captures more than 14 million galaxies, offering the first glimpse into the “cosmic atlas.” This mapping project could further our understanding of the role dark matter and dark energy play in the structure of the universe.
“The scale of it is completely incomprehensible,” Carol Mandel, ESA’s scientific director, told the International Astronautical Congress in Italy. She said more than 16,000 4K television screens would be needed to represent the images in full resolution.
Euclid’s first mosaic image represents just 1 percent of the final map
ESA
The 260-image mosaic offers the first glimpse of Euclid’s project to create the largest and most accurate map of the universe to date. The huge number of galaxies was captured during a two-week expedition in April and represents just 1% of the final map. This image covers an area of the southern sky approximately 500 times larger than the full moon.
Mandel said the faint blue bands across the image are dust and gas in the nearby Milky Way, known as “galactic cirrus clouds.” Zooming in reveals interacting spiral galaxies hundreds of millions of light-years away, some with supermassive black holes at their centers that generate measurable gravitational waves on Earth.
Over the next six years, the telescope will autonomously scan about a third of the night sky. The researchers predict that the final map will show about 8 billion galaxies spanning 10 billion years of cosmic history, each containing billions of stars.
ESA’s Valeria Petrino said at the meeting that by observing galaxy clusters and other phenomena such as how gravity bends light, “Euclidean was able to measure the web of the universe, the distribution of matter in space and time. I will.” Dark energy and dark matter influence the formation of voids between galaxy clusters, so measuring these voids could help us understand the characteristics of these elusive materials, she said. Ta.
“We’re testing fundamental physical laws at the extreme scales of the universe,” Mandel said.
topic:
(Tag translation) Astronomy
