On Tuesday (Nov. 7), we’ll get to see the universe in full color through the eyes of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid telescope for the primary time.
Euclid mission scientists are gathering in Darmstadt, Germany, to debate the telescope’s first five full-color images of the distant cosmos, and you’ll be able to watch Tuesday’s reveal live at 9:15 a.m. EST (1415 GMT) here on Space.com, courtesy of ESA. Along with holding scientific value, the photographs are also expected to be great cosmic eye candy.
Launched in July on a six-year mission to review the cosmos, Euclid is now studying the dark side of the universe from a perch roughly 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) from Earth — the identical cosmic accommodation as NASA’s mighty James Webb Space Telescope.
Euclid has been tasked with constructing an progressive 3D map of the dark universe by charting out shapes and distributions of billions of galaxies and star clusters as much as 10 billion light-years away, primarily searching for clues about elusive dark matter and dark energy.
To realize that goal, the telescope is primed to take enough sharp images of huge swaths of the sky in visible and infrared wavelengths to fill one million DVDs. To analyze the dark universe, Euclid will observe weak gravitational lensing, a cosmic phenomena which occurs because of the possibility alignment of galaxies or conglomerations of matter, which allows foreground galaxies to behave like a large magnifying lens of objects behind them. Light from background sources is distorted, even multiplied on its approach to Earth, such that we see their twisted, surreal illusions around lensing galaxies.
Since visible matter comprises just 10% or so of the full mass of most galaxy clusters, scientists suspect invisible dark matter particles are liable for much of this lensing. So, studying galaxy clusters could make clear the behavior and nature of dark matter — but those images must be super-sharp to bring fuzzy lensed images around galaxies into focus.
Euclid gave humanity a taste of its abilities at the tip of July, when it sent home two images dotted with countless stars and sprinkled with blobs of sunshine, that are really faraway galaxies.
The newest images will little doubt be equally enchanting. Additionally they will reassure scientists that the telescope instruments are working as expected.
“The mission is nearly ready to start out its six-year collection of knowledge,” Roland Vavrek, Euclid’s deputy project scientist, who has been involved with the mission since 2013, said in a video released on Friday (Nov. 3).