The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid telescope has successfully captured its first test images as it looks to shed light on dark matter that fills the universe. ESA says that the captivating snapshots showcasing a glittering field of stars indicate that the telescope functions well after its million-kilometer journey from Earth. “The results show that VIS is working perfectly and that we can already see amazing details,” says the project’s lead, Giuseppe Racca. Euclid’s two instruments, the visible-wavelength camera VIS and the near-infrared spectrometer and photometer, or NISP, worked as expected. The black-and-white image is a swath of the sky that’s only about a quarter of the width and height of the Moon, but it is full of detail. The red image is a single galaxy that is more zoomed in. Euclid’s NISP instrument is designed to spot galaxies across the sky and measure their shape.
As Euclid starts observing in earnest, it will create the most extensive map of the cosmos ever made by spotting billions of galaxies that reside up to 10 billion light-years away. That 3D map will show the cosmic evolution of galaxies and other large-scale structures and help scientists pinpoint dark energy’s nature.
It will also probe the shapes of distant galaxies and their warped appearance caused by the intervening dark-matter-suffused space they have traveled through. Observing in both visible and near-infrared light, Euclid can also use its spectroscopy tools to pinpoint the age of 30 million galaxies by picking apart their light and measuring their chemical makeup. The data will be used to establish whether the universe’s expanding expansion is driven by dark energy, modified gravity, or some other theory.
Euclid was launched from Cape Canaveral on July 1 using a US SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket after ESA switched from Russia’s Soyuz to Elon Musk’s firm’s vehicle because of Russia’s sanctions over Ukraine. It is now floating about a million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth at the second Lagrange point, along with NASA’s James Webb telescope. It will undergo commissioning and performance-verification tests over the next few months before formally starting its epic cosmic survey.
Professors Bhuvnesh Jain and Mark Trodden of UC Berkeley’s School of Arts & Sciences were at the rocket launch site in Florida, watching Euclid blast off on its quest to find dark matter and energy. They are looking forward to the scientific data that will come back.
The pictures from the VIS camera on Euclid are only its first test shots, and they are still undergoing processing to remove undesired artifacts such as cosmic rays. However, the snapshots reveal that the telescope delivers high-quality observations after its long flight and should be able to transform later, longer exposures into scientifically valuable images that are artifact-free and much more detailed. The consortium will release those images once Euclid’s normal science operations kick in October.
