New Telescope is Able to Explore Dark Energy and Dark Matter
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The universe is a mystery that scientists have been trying to crack and understand for hundreds of years, in order to figure out the secrets of life itself. With this new telescope, they might be closer than ever. The Euclid telescope will launch in July, and scientists and space experts are already excited.
According to a report by The Guardian, the mission is getting ready to explore two of the universe’s most mysterious phenomena: dark energy and dark matter. Astrophysicist Prof. Andy Taylor of Edinburgh University said- “We cannot say we understand the universe if the nature of these dark components remains a mystery… That is why Euclid is so important.”
Euclid will begin its journey on July 1st and will take a month to cross the solar system to its destination,150 million km from Earth at a position known as the second Lagrange point where it will be able to investigate dark energy and dark matter.
Astronomer Stephen Wilkins of Sussex University told The Guardian: “Euclid has the resolving power of the Hubble space telescope but will be able to survey a third of the night sky at the same time, so it will give us an incredibly detailed map of the heavens.”
Since dark matter cannot be seen directly, Euclid will exploit a phenomenon called gravitational lensing by taking millions of images of galaxies that showcase light passing through them and their gravitational field stretching. Scientists hope the tool will be able to trace back how the universe has expanded over the past 10 billion years.
“The point of Euclid is really to get the data that will allow us to start discriminating between which of the different ideas we have about the dark universe,” Taylor told The Guardian, and added “Hopefully that will help us understand what fundamentally is really going on in the cosmos around us.”
