The goal of the Euclid mission is to understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy, creating high-quality maps of the spatial distribution of billions of galaxies from a third of the sky.
According to the announcement, by combining two individually ambitious but fundamentally separate research methods, the Euclid Space Telescope will seek answers to questions such as how fast the universe is expanding, what is the origin of the dark matter surrounding galaxies, and how to imagine it. The universe today is accelerating and expanding the dark energy contained in empty space.
Its special advantage is its ability to capture exceptionally deep, high-resolution images of a billion distant galaxies, from which it can reconstruct an ever-larger two-dimensional map of dark matter from small distortions in galaxy shape. In addition, the priority goal is to measure the distance of 35 million carefully selected galaxies in order to create a 3D map, from which it will be possible to infer the possible change of dark energy over time, thus testing Einstein’s general theory of relativity on a new scale.
According to the previous article of the trade portal Csillagászat.hu, the spacecraft will reach the L2 gravitational balance point 1.5 million kilometers from Earth at the end of a one-month journey after launch. After reaching L2 and a few months of calibration, Euclid will begin scanning 36 percent of the sky. In just two days, it will survey as much of the sky as the Hubble Space Telescope has done for more than three decades. It will capture an estimated 10 billion galaxies, stars and objects in the solar system, and set new investigation targets for the James Webb Space Telescope and large ground-based telescopes.
According to the announcement of Svábhegyi Csillagwiszgáló, a total of more than 1,000 engineers and researchers contributed to the planning and implementation of the Euclid project, and Hungarian specialists participated in the preparation for 12 years.
Since 2017, András Kovács, researcher at the Research Center for Astronomy and Earth Sciences (CSFK), and István Szapudi (University of Hawaii) have also participated in the collaboration. They will also deal with the analysis of Euclid’s first data. In collaboration with Gábor Rácz, who works on Euclid simulations at NASA’s Planetary Research Institute, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California, the two Hungarian cosmologists will work to identify the largest galactic structures in their field at scales of billions of light. years. In this way, the repulsive cosmic influence of dark energy will be investigated in the most extreme giant clusters with thousands of galaxies and in the so-called void regions containing only a few galaxies.
The collaboration plans to maintain data collection for 6 years, and many exciting discoveries are expected not only regarding the dark universe, but also, for example, from studying a billion solar-mass black holes in the centers of galaxies or the morphology of billions of galaxies. years.
During the live broadcast, CSFK demonstrator Olivér Norton Szabó will speak to András Kovács as host of the event, while István Szapudi, who witnessed Euclid’s launch in Florida, will report from the scene.
(MTI)
