After a European probe is launched into orbit in a few weeks, the scientists aim to learn more about the dark side of the universe. The Euclid project, worth €1 billion ($1.10 billion), will examine the universe’s two most perplexing components, dark matter and dark energy.
Astronomers cannot see the universe’s dark matter and dark energy, thus they can only deduce their existence by calculating their influence on the behaviour of galaxies and stars. “We cannot say we understand the universe if the nature of these dark components remains a mystery,” said Edinburgh University astrophysicist Prof Andy Taylor. “That is why Euclid is so important,” he went on to say.
Euclid will require a month to fly across the solar system to its target, which is 150 million kilometres from Earth
The professor stated that the scientists in the UK had played an important role in building and designing the probe. “We thought what would be the biggest, most fundamentally important project we could do? The answer was Euclid, which has now been designed, built and is ready for launch,” Taylor said. Euclid was supposed to be launched on a Russian Soyuz rocket last year. However, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the European Space Agency ceased cooperation with the Russian space agency Roscosmos and negotiated a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to operate the Falcon 9 rocket.
Euclid, which will be launched on July 1, will require a month to fly across the solar system to its target, which is 150 million kilometres from Earth and known as the second Lagrange point. The craft will be able to peer into deep space from this point, with the Earth, moon, and sun behind it. The two-tonne spaceship will then begin its scan of the heavens.
“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,” said astronomer Stephen Wilkins, of Sussex University. “Gravitational lensing produced by dark matter will tell us a great deal about what it is made of,” stated Prof Mathilde Jouzac of Durham University. “It may be that dark matter is made up of light particles. If so, they will produce one kind of lensing. On the other hand, if dark matter is made of very large particles, that will produce a different set of lensing. This information will then help direct the search for dark matter particles on Earth,” he added.