The European Euclid space telescope mission revealed this Tuesday the first fragment of its future large map of the Universe, which concentrates millions of stars and galaxies that correspond to 1% of what will be shown in six years.
The first piece of the map was shown this Tuesday by the director general of the European Space Agency (ESA), Josef Aschbacher, at the International Astronautical Congress, which runs until Friday in Milan, Italy.
The “mosaic” contains 260 observations made between March 25 and April 8 and In two weeks the telescope “scanned” an area of the southern sky equivalent to more than 500 times the area of the full Moon.
The Euclid telescope, sent into space in July 2023 with Portuguese technology on board, will observe the shapes, distances and movements of billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light years away and, in doing so, will generate the largest cosmic probe three-dimensional. map.
The first fragment of the map features stars from the Milky Way and other galaxies, with 14 million of these galaxies “can be used to study the hidden influence of dark matter and energy in the Universe”says the ESA in a statement.
The ESA also highlights in the revealed images “dark clouds between the stars” of the Milky Way, which “appear in light blue against the black background of space” and which “are a mixture of gas and dust.”
Since the Euclid mission began routine science observations in February, 12% of its sky scanning has been completed.
Cosmological data collected in the first year of the mission will be published in 2026.
In November 2023, ESA published the first five images of the Universe captured by the space telescope, in the case of the galaxy cluster Perseus, the spiral galaxy IC 342, the irregular dwarf galaxy NGC 6822, the globular cluster NGC 6397 and the Nebula of the Head. . Horse.
Located 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the Euclid telescope will observe, over six years, billions of galaxies (in which dark matter and energy generate effects on their structure, shape, distribution, movement and evolution) in more than a third of the planet. sky and “backwards” up to 10 billion light years.
Together, dark energy and dark matter make up 95% of the Universe that remains to be discovered.
The ESA mission is the first that was designed to try to understand what actually accelerates the expansion of the Universe and which, according to cosmological theories, is due to dark energy, a mysterious force that opposes gravitational attraction.
The Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences is involved in planning the approximately 50,000 galaxy observations that the telescope will make throughout its mission.
Portuguese companies produced several components of the space telescope.
For the first time, Portugal occupies a prominent place in an ESA space mission by being part of a consortium created to develop, build and explore the telescope.
Euclid is the English term for Euclid, the name of the ancient Greek mathematician considered the “father” of Geometry and whom the ESA wanted to honor.
Source: Observadora
