“No telescope has ever been able to capture such clear images of such a wide area of the sky and at the same time look into the distance,” the HUN-REN Research Center for Astronomy and Earth Sciences (CSFK) said in a statement on Tuesday. distant universe.
It was reported that CSFK researcher Andras Kovacs is also involved in the work of the Euclid Collaboration supported by the MTA Lendület programme, contributing to a six-year mapping of dark matter and dark energy.
One of the biggest mysteries of cosmology is that about 95% of the universe is made up of “dark” components, the properties of which we have no idea at all. They explained that its existence could be inferred from the spatial arrangement and movement of stars and galaxies through the effects of their gravity, but its true origin remained a mystery despite ongoing work.
“Dark matter holds galaxies together and forces them to spin faster than visible matter alone, and dark energy drives the accelerating expansion of the universe. “For the first time, Euclid allows cosmologists to study these competing dark components,” Carol Mundell, ESA’s science director, said in the statement. together”.
He adds: “Euclid represents a leap forward in our understanding of the universe as a whole, and Euclid’s unparalleled images show that the collaboration is poised to help solve one of the greatest mysteries in modern physics.”
In order to uncover the nature of the dark entities affecting the observable universe, Euclid will monitor the shapes and distances of nearly a billion galaxies over the next six years, and will look up to 10 billion years into the cosmic past, according to the announcement. This will create the largest 3D cosmic map ever created. This statistical analysis will also be contributed by András Kovacs, a researcher at CSFK, whose work is supported by István Šabudi, a professor at the University of Hawaii, within the framework of the MTA Visitation Research Program.
“Galaxies are part of a cosmic web resembling a spider’s web, located along long threads, at the nodes of which are galaxy clusters, and between them we find almost empty spaces up to 500 million light-years across,” explains András Kovacs from the MTA-CSFK Lendület Nagysskálás Szerkezezet research group in the announcement. . Its leader. “Based on Euclid simulations and data that will arrive soon, we are dealing with so-called empty regions, which barely contain galaxies, because dark energy effects here, which can be considered a strange property of empty energy,” he adds: “Space can be detected more clearly in the absence of matter.” “Light and dark.”
But how does dark matter become visible, and why does it need a space telescope costing around a billion euros? – they wonder, and add that the answer is the effect of gravitational lensing: small distortions appear in the shape of distant galaxies, as their light is slightly bent due to the presence of closer galaxies and, to a greater extent, dark matter around them. Since we know the amount of visible matter, it is possible to determine the amount of dark matter separately.
Euclid could be a particularly important new source of data in this field, because precise measurement of the shape of small, distant, faint galaxies is no longer possible with ground-based telescopes due to the disturbing effects of the atmosphere. Images released today demonstrate a special ability of the Euclid Space Telescope: from bright stars to faint galaxies, observations reveal these entire celestial bodies while remaining extremely sharp, even when focusing on distant galaxies.
“We have never seen astronomical images containing this amount of detail before. They are more beautiful and clearer than we had hoped, and show many features previously unseen in the nearby universe. “We are now finally ready to observe billions of galaxies and study their evolution over cosmic timescales,” he said. René Lorig, one of the lead scientists on the Euclid project, was quoted in the announcement.
Based on Euclid’s data, the effect of gravitational lensing can be measured on a much larger sample of galaxies, which will allow us to obtain more precise information about the nature of dark matter and dark energy. Based on precise measurements collected over six years, it may be possible to understand the 95% of the universe that is currently shrouded in darkness, which is summarized in the report.
