Euclid mission reveals “page 1” of our cosmic story | by Ethan Siegel | Starts With A Bang! | Oct, 2024

MarylandDigitalNews.comSCIENCE

posted on Oct. 28, 2024 at 2:38 pm

This composite map shows stars from ESA’s Gaia mission and dust from ESA’s Planck mission, together, along with the first 1% of the Euclid catalog’s data, just released, shown in yellow. A 36x zoom into the Euclid region reveals galaxy cluster Abell 3381, at lower-left. (Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA; ESA/Gaia/DPAC; ESA/Planck Collaboration; Processing: J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi; Composition: E. Siegel)

What are dark matter and dark energy? The large-scale structure of the cosmos encodes them both, with ESA’s Euclid mission leading the way.

Measuring our Universe is challenging from within the Milky Way.

The European Space Agency’s space-based Gaia mission has mapped out the three-dimensional positions and locations of more than one billion stars in our Milky Way galaxy: the most of all-time. Looking toward the center of the Milky Way, Gaia reveals both light-blocking and luminous features that are scientifically and visually fascinating. (Credit: ESA/Gaia/DPAC)

Optical measurements pinpoint stars, while longer wavelengths reveal dust.

When the entire sky is viewed in a variety of wavelengths, certain sources corresponding to distant objects beyond our galaxy are revealed. This first all-sky map from Planck includes not only the cosmic microwave background, but also extragalactic contributions and the foreground contributions from matter within the Milky Way itself. All of these must be understood to tease out the appropriate temperature and polarization signals. (Credit: ESA, HFI and LFI consortia; CO map from T. Dame et al., 2001)

From space, ESA’s Euclid mission has grander aims.

Each time the Euclid telescope points at a region of sky, its VIS and NISP instruments have access to the same half-a-square-degree (0.57 square degrees) so long as Euclid remains pointed there. Once observations are complete, Euclid then “steps” to point at the next, adjacent patch of sky. By performing tens of thousands of these steps, Euclid will build up the largest high-resolution extragalactic catalog in history. (Credit: European Space Agency)

Over six years, total, it will map out huge areas of the entire sky.

By targeting the most dust-free regions of the sky, the ones least obscured by the foreground material present in the Milky Way, ESA’s Euclid mission seeks to map out an enormous portion of the sky at great depth and at very high resolutions. The science goals are to map out galaxy positions and the effects of mass throughout cosmic history, revealing new information about dark matter and dark energy. (Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA/Planck Collaboration/A. Mellinger)

These maps aren’t merely large-area, but also deep and high-resolution.

MarylandDigitalNews.comOctober 28, 2024

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