Messier 78 is a star formation nursery shrouded in a veil of interstellar dust located 1,300 light years from Earth. Using his infrared camera, Euclid exposed hidden regions of star formation for the first time and mapped complex filaments of gas and dust in unprecedented detail. Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi; Standard CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA license
Euclid, an ESA mission with NASASupport from , aims to map the sky and study dark matter and dark energy. Its new images and data reveal important scientific discoveries, including free-floating planets and brown dwarfs, improving our understanding of the universe.
The Euclid mission has released five new images that showcase the space telescope’s ability to explore two large-scale cosmic mysteries: dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter is an invisible substance five times more widespread in the universe than “ordinary” matter, but whose composition is unknown. “Dark energy” is the name given to the unknown Source that is causing the universe to expand more and more rapidly. The Euclid mission is led by ESA (the European Space Agency) with contributions from NASA,
Cosmic mapping and precision
By 2030, Euclid will create a cosmic map covering nearly a third of the sky, using a much wider field of view than NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, designed to study smaller areas with more details. Scientists will then be able to map the presence of dark matter with greater precision than ever before. They can also use this map to study how the strength of dark energy changes over time.
The galaxy cluster Abell 2764 (top right), photographed by ESA’s Euclid telescope, contains hundreds of galaxies. The area outside the cluster also contains distant galaxies that appear as they did when the universe was only 700 million years old. Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi; Standard CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA license
The five new images show views of different sizes — of a star-forming region in the Milky Way galaxy to clusters of hundreds of galaxies – and were taken shortly after Euclid launched in July 2023 as part of its Early Release Observations Program. The mission released five images from this program last year as a preview of what Euclid would offer, before scientists analyzed the data.
New images and search availability
The new images, associated scientific articles and data are available on the Euclid website. A pre-recorded ESA program on these findings is available on ESA TV and YouTube.
Mission planners for NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will use Euclid’s findings to inform Roman’s complementary work on dark energy. Scientists will use Roman, with its improved sensitivity and sharpness, to expand the type of science that Euclid enables by studying fainter, more distant galaxies.
Euclid’s view of the Dorado group of galaxies shows signs of galaxy interaction and merger. The shells of white and hazy yellow matter, as well as the curved “tails” extending into space, provide evidence of gravitational interaction between galaxies. Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi; Standard CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA license
Curved space and gravitational lensing
In particular, Euclid will help scientists study dark matter by observing how this mysterious phenomenon distorts the light of distant galaxies, as shown in one of the new images showing a galaxy cluster called Abell 2390. The mass of the galaxy cluster, which includes dark galaxies. matter, creates curves in space. Light from more distant galaxies traveling on these curves appears to bend or bend, similar to the way light appears when passing through the warped glass of an old window. Sometimes the distortion is so powerful that it can create rings, sharp arcs, or multiple images of the same galaxy – a phenomenon called strong gravitational lensing.
Scientists interested in exploring the effects of dark energy will primarily look for a more subtle effect, called weak gravitational lensing, which requires detailed computational analysis to detect and reveal the presence of even smaller dark matter clusters. By mapping this dark matter and tracing the evolution of these clusters over time, scientists will study how the outward acceleration of dark energy has changed the distribution of dark matter.
More than 50,000 galaxies are visible in this image of Abell 2390, a galaxy cluster located 2.7 billion light years from Earth. Near the center of the image, some galaxies appear blotchy and curved, an effect called strong gravitational lensing that can be used to detect dark matter. Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi; Standard CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA license
Instruments and observation capabilities
“Because dark energy is a relatively small effect, we need larger surveys to give us more data and better statistical precision,” said Mike Seiffert, NASA’s Euclid project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. agency in Southern California. “It’s not something that allows us to zoom in on a galaxy and study it in detail. We need to look at a much larger area and still be able to detect these subtle effects. To achieve this, we needed a specialized space telescope like Euclid.
The telescope uses two instruments that detect different wavelengths of light: the Visible Light Imager (VIS) and the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP). Foreground galaxies emit more light in visible wavelengths (those that the human eye can perceive), while background galaxies are generally brighter in infrared wavelengths.
“Observing a galaxy cluster with both instruments allows us to see galaxies at wider distances than we could achieve using only visible or infrared,” said JPLJason Rhodes, principal investigator of NASA’s Euclid Dark Energy Science Team. “And Euclid can produce these kinds of deep, wide, high-resolution images hundreds of times faster than other telescopes.” »
Euclid’s large field of view captures the entire galaxy NGC 6744 and shows astronomers key areas of star formation. Star formation is the primary means by which galaxies grow and evolve. This research is therefore essential to understanding why galaxies look the way they do. Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi; Standard CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA license
Discoveries beyond dark energy
While dark matter and dark energy are at the heart of Euclid. The mission has various other astronomical applications. Euclid’s large-scale sky map can, for example, be used to discover faint objects and observe changes in cosmic objects, such as a star changing brightness. Euclid’s new scientific results include the detection of floating planets (planets that do not orbit stars), which are difficult to find due to their low luminosity. Additionally, the data reveals recently discovered brown dwarfs. Thought to form like stars but not large enough to begin fusion in their cores, these objects highlight the differences between stars and planets.
“The published data, images and scientific papers now mark the very beginning of Euclid’s scientific results and show a surprisingly large scientific diversity beyond the mission’s primary objective,” Seiffert said. “What we already observe through Euclid’s broad vision has produced results that study individual planets, features of our galaxy, the Milky Way, and the structure of the universe on a large scale. It’s both exciting and a little overwhelming to keep up with all the developments.
Euclid’s contributions and support
Three science teams supported by NASA are contributing to the Euclid mission. In addition to designing and manufacturing the sensor chip electronics for Euclid’s Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) instrument, JPL also led the purchase and delivery of the NISP detectors. These detectors, along with the sensor chip electronics, were tested at NASA’s Detector Characterization Laboratory at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. NASA’s Euclid Science Center at IPAC (ENSCI), at Caltech in Pasadena, California, will archive science data and support scientific research conducted in the United States. JPL is a division of Caltech.
