Euclid space telescope is about to launch to probe the dark cosmos
The European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope is scheduled to launch on 1 July and then begin its mission of studying the effects of dark energy and dark matter
By Leah Crane
26 June 2023
An artist’s impression of the Euclid space telescope
ESA
The European Space Agency (ESA) is gearing up to launch its newest space telescope, Euclid, which is scheduled to blast off from Cape Canaveral in Florida on 1 July. Euclid is designed to help solve two of the biggest mysteries in the universe: dark energy and dark matter.
These two “dark” components make up more than 95 per cent per cent of the cosmos, but we cannot see them, hence their names, and know very little about what they could be made of. Astronomers infer the existence of dark matter from the behaviour of the matter that we can see, which acts as if there is some extra source of gravity holding everything together. Dark energy has the opposite effect, causing the accelerating expansion of the universe as a whole.
Euclid has two scientific instruments: a visible light camera to measure the shape of galaxies, and a near-infrared detector to measure their brightness and distance. While it isn’t the first space telescope to use either of these types of instruments, it will be unusual in that it is planned to observe a huge swathe of space, cataloguing over a billion galaxies across more than one-third of the sky.
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“With Hubble and the James Webb Space Telescope, those are great observatories for looking at very small regions with very high sensitivity, extraordinary detail – but it’s a bit like looking at the sky through a tiny straw,” says Mike Seiffert at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, a project scientists for Euclid. “With Euclid we’re less interested in the properties of individual galaxies and objects than we are in measuring a few properties of many, many galaxies.”
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Researchers will then use these properties to build two types of map of the universe. The first will use a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, in which relatively nearby matter warps and magnifies the light of objects behind it. The way this bends the apparent shapes of distant objects can tell us about the distribution of the nearby matter acting as the lens.
