Europe’s Euclid space telescope released its first images on Tuesday, revealing a dazzling horse’s head nebula, never-before-seen distant galaxies and even “indirect evidence” of the existence of elusive dark matter.
Euclid had blasted off in July on the world’s first mission to study the cosmic mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.
It accomplishes its task by mapping a third of the sky to create what has been billed as the most accurate 3D map of the Universe.
After joining another space telescope, the James Webb, at an observation point some 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the European probe began sending its first observations, revealed Tuesday at the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany.
Five “stunning” images, reacted Josef Aschbacher, head of the European Space Agency (ESA), congratulating the “more than 3,600 people” involved in the mission. In a message from Seville where a space summit is being held, he hailed “an important step for European science and exploration”.
Among the photos, an image of the Horsehead Nebula within the nearby constellation of Orion, a dwarf galaxy, another hidden…
For René Laureijs, scientific manager of the project, the most “exciting” image is that of the Perseus cluster, a distant collection of more than a thousand galaxies.
Because in the background there are more than 100,000 additional galaxies, some of which are located 10 billion light years away and have never been observed.
Euclid’s particularity is to have a wide field of vision “never before seen in the history of astronomy”, where James Webb “looks at the sky through the eye of a needle” in particular to explore the early ages of the Universe, explained to AFP Jean-Charles Cuillandre, astronomer at the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), member of the Euclid consortium.
It is thanks to this broad view that the telescope, equipped with two devices (optical and near infrared), manages to capture such vast images, with “extreme precision”, underlined Carole Mundell, scientific director of the ESA. All very quickly: the first five images only took about eight hours.
The ESA describes Euclid as its “dark universe detective,” tasked with investigating why 95 percent of the cosmos appears to be made up of dark matter and dark energy, about which we know almost nothing.
Dark matter, attractive, acts as a glue for galaxies, which prevents stars from being ejected. Dark, repulsive energy “is the driving force behind the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe,” explains Carole Mundell.
Euclid’s first delivery has already revealed “indirect evidence” of the existence of dark matter, according to René Laureijs. For example, it is “surprising” that the probe did not spot any stars trailing the globular cluster NGC 6397 – a conglomerate of stars. “One of the theories is that there could be dark matter around.”
The European mission must last until at least 2029.