Recently, a new space telescope named Euclid was successfully launched by ESA (European Space Agency) with important contributions from NASA. Euclid was launched on July 1st on a SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.
Euclid mission will explore why the universe’s expansion is speeding up. Scientists call the unknown cause of this cosmic acceleration “dark energy.” By May 2027, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will join ESA's Euclid to explore this puzzle in ways that have never been possible before.
ESA’s Euclid and NASA’s Roman spacecraft will work in complementary ways to shed light on some of the universe’s most mysterious components.
Scientists are unsure whether the universe’s accelerated expansion is caused by an additional energy component or whether it signals that our understanding of gravity needs to be changed in some way. Astronomers will use Roman and Euclid to test both theories at the same time, and scientists expect both missions to uncover important information about the underlying workings of the universe.
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| Image by WikiImages from Pixabay |
The first observational evidence for the existence of Dark Energy came from measurements of supernovas, which showed that the universe does not expand at a constant rate; rather, the universe's expansion is accelerating.
Roman and Euclid will provide separate streams of compelling new data to fill in gaps in our understanding. They’ll attempt to pin down cosmic acceleration’s cause in a few different ways.
NASA's Roman Space Telescope has a 2.4m telescope, the same size as of legendary Hubble telescope, but with a view 100 times greater than Hubble’s, capturing more of the sky with less observing time.
While the ESA's Euclid spacecraft will have a launch mass of around 2100 kg and about 4.5 metres tall and 3.1 metres in 'diameter' (with appendages stowed).
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| Euclid |
Euclid and Roman are both designed to study cosmic acceleration, but using different and complementary strategies. Both missions will make 3D maps of the universe to answer fundamental questions about the history and structure of the universe. Together, they will be much more powerful than either individually.
Euclid will observe a far larger area of the sky – approximately 15,000 square degrees, or about a third of the sky – in both infrared and optical wavelengths of light, but with less detail than Roman. It will peer back 10 billion years to when the universe was about 3 billion years old.
Besides this, the two missions will also study the way galaxies clustered together in different cosmic eras.
Scientists have detected a pattern in the way galaxies congregate from measurements of the nearby universe. For any galaxy today, we are about twice as likely to find another galaxy about 500 million light-years away than a little nearer or farther.
This distance has grown over time due to the expansion of space. By looking farther out into the universe, to earlier cosmic times, astronomers can study the preferred distance between galaxies in different eras. Seeing how it has changed will reveal the expansion history of the universe. Seeing how galaxy clustering varies over time will also enable an accurate test of gravity. This will help astronomers differentiate between an unknown energy component and various modified gravity theories as explanations for cosmic acceleration.
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