08-11-2023, 02:31 PM
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67343374
"Europe's Euclid telescope is ready to begin its quest to understand the greatest mysteries in the Universe.
Exquisite imagery from the space observatory shows its capabilities to be exceptional.
Over the next six years, Euclid will survey a third of the heavens to get some clues about the nature of so-called dark matter and dark energy.
These unknown "influencers" appear to control the shape and expansion of everything that's out there.
Researchers concede, however, they know virtually nothing about them, even though they probably account for 95% of the contents of the cosmos.
Neither dark matter nor dark energy are directly detectable. Our only hope of gaining some understanding is to trace their subtle signals in the things we can see.
This will be Euclid's job: to observe the contours, distances and motions of billions of galaxies, some of whose light has taken almost the entire age of the Universe to reach us.
Somewhere in the statistics of this 3D cosmic map - the largest ever made - scientists expect to find answers.
Euclid's survey will be the most fundamental of inquires, argued Prof Carole Mundell, the director of science at the European Space Agency (Esa).
"We are human, we want to understand everything around us; whether that was as ancient people looking at the night sky and drawing constellations on our caves, or trying to understand whether the Sun would come back after the winter - we seek that knowledge and insight," she told BBC News.
"We don't currently understand 95% of the Universe, a universe that is 13.8 billion years old. We're sentient beings who've been around for a tiny fraction of that time, but we could be the species that gets to figure it all out."
Dark matter and dark energy are among the biggest puzzles in modern astrophysics.
The former could be some as-yet-undetected particle. Astronomers infer its presence from the gravitational pull it exerts on the matter we can see. Galaxies would fly apart if it wasn't there.
The latter represents a very different problem. It could be some kind of energy in the vacuum of space. Whatever it is, it appears to be working against gravity to push galaxies apart at an ever-accelerating rate."
"Europe's Euclid telescope is ready to begin its quest to understand the greatest mysteries in the Universe.
Exquisite imagery from the space observatory shows its capabilities to be exceptional.
Over the next six years, Euclid will survey a third of the heavens to get some clues about the nature of so-called dark matter and dark energy.
These unknown "influencers" appear to control the shape and expansion of everything that's out there.
Researchers concede, however, they know virtually nothing about them, even though they probably account for 95% of the contents of the cosmos.
Neither dark matter nor dark energy are directly detectable. Our only hope of gaining some understanding is to trace their subtle signals in the things we can see.
This will be Euclid's job: to observe the contours, distances and motions of billions of galaxies, some of whose light has taken almost the entire age of the Universe to reach us.
Somewhere in the statistics of this 3D cosmic map - the largest ever made - scientists expect to find answers.
Euclid's survey will be the most fundamental of inquires, argued Prof Carole Mundell, the director of science at the European Space Agency (Esa).
"We are human, we want to understand everything around us; whether that was as ancient people looking at the night sky and drawing constellations on our caves, or trying to understand whether the Sun would come back after the winter - we seek that knowledge and insight," she told BBC News.
"We don't currently understand 95% of the Universe, a universe that is 13.8 billion years old. We're sentient beings who've been around for a tiny fraction of that time, but we could be the species that gets to figure it all out."
Dark matter and dark energy are among the biggest puzzles in modern astrophysics.
The former could be some as-yet-undetected particle. Astronomers infer its presence from the gravitational pull it exerts on the matter we can see. Galaxies would fly apart if it wasn't there.
The latter represents a very different problem. It could be some kind of energy in the vacuum of space. Whatever it is, it appears to be working against gravity to push galaxies apart at an ever-accelerating rate."
in order to be old & wise, you must first be young & stupid. (I'm still working on that.)
