New telescope searching for invisible matter in our universe reveals stunning new images | Radio-Canada News
Dark matter and dark energy make up about 95% of our universe, but they are not visible. To reveal their influence, during its six-year mission, the Euclid Space Telescope will observe the shapes, distances and movements of billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light years away and create the largest cosmic map in 3D never made. Below are five of the first images of Euclid released by the European Space Agency.
Euclid shows us a spectacularly panoramic and detailed view of the Horsehead Nebula, also known as Barnard 33, which lies in the constellation Orion. In Euclid’s new observation of this stellar nursery, scientists hope to find many dark Jupiter-mass planets previously unseen in their celestial infancy, as well as young brown dwarfs and baby stars.
(ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA; Image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi)
This incredible snapshot of Euclid is a revolution for astronomy. The image shows 1,000 galaxies belonging to the Perseus cluster and more than 100,000 additional galaxies further away in the background. Many of these faint galaxies were previously invisible. Some of them are so distant that their light took 10 billion years to reach us. By mapping the distribution and shape of these galaxies, cosmologists will be able to learn more about how dark matter – an invisible mass exerting an enormous gravitational pull on a galactic scale – shaped the universe we see today. .
(ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA; Image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi)
Over the course of his life, Euclid, whom the European Space Agency has dubbed a “dark universe detective,” will image billions of galaxies, revealing the invisible influence that dark matter and dark energy have on them. This is why it is fitting that one of the first galaxies observed by Euclid is nicknamed the “Hidden Galaxy”, also known as IC 342 or Caldwell 5. Thanks to its infrared view, Euclid has already discovered crucial information about the stars of this galaxy, which is a dead ringer for our Milky Way.
(ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA; Image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi)
This scintillating image shows Euclid’s view of a globular cluster called NGC 6397. It is the second closest globular cluster to Earth, located about 7,800 light years away. Globular clusters are collections of hundreds of thousands of stars bound by gravity. Currently, no telescope other than Euclid can observe an entire globular cluster in a single observation, and at the same time distinguish so many stars in the cluster. These faint stars tell us the history of the Milky Way and the location of dark matter.
(ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA; Image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi)
