Europe’s Euclid space telescope launched on mission to explore ‘dark universe’

unseen forces scientists say account for 95 per cent of the known universe.

From there, Euclid is designed to explore the evolution of what astrophysicists refer to as the “dark universe,” using a wide-angle telescope to survey galaxies as far away as 10 billion light years from Earth across an immense expanse of the sky beyond our own Milky Way Galaxy. The possibilities of the mission are reflected by the enormity of Euclid’s inquiry. Scientists estimate dark energy and dark matter together make up 95 per cent of the cosmos, while ordinary matter that we can see accounts for just 5 per cent.Euclid was designed and built entirely by ESA, with the U.S. space agency, NASA, supplying photo detectors for its near-infrared instrument. The Euclid Consortium overall comprises more than 2,000 scientists from 13 European nations, the U.S.

Dark matter and dark energy cannot be detected directly, but their properties “are encoded in the shapes and positions of the galaxies,” said astrophysicist Jason Rhodes, lead scientist for Euclid at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles. Observing subtle but distinct changes in the shapes and positions of galaxies over vast spans of time and space will reveal fine variations in cosmic acceleration, indirectly exposing the forces of dark energy, scientists say.

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