The European Space
Agency (ESA) has given the green light to the Euclid mission to be launched in
2020 with the aim to study the mysterious dark energy that makes up 73% of the
universe. The Euclid mission will feature a 1.2-meter telescope that will nourish
a chamber diameter of 576 million pixels with very high resolution images of
galaxies 2,000 million, equivalent to the Hubble telescope.
With these data, and
using infrared technology, scientists will develop a mapping of large
structures in the universe and measure the distance between galaxies captured
by the camera.
"Getting this far
has required much hard work, but now we have a solid blueprint for a telescope
likely to provide very precise measurements that will shed light on the nature
of dark energy," he said in a statement the project manager Euclid,
Yannick Mellier.
More than 1,000
scientists participating in the mission, approved by the Scientific Program
Committee of ESA, try to figure out why the universe's expansion rate
increases, rather than slowing, a discovery that dates back to 1998, said Space
Agency Europe.
The observation of
galaxies away from each other confirmed the Big Bang theory, and experts have
noted that this separation occurs increasingly faster, something
"unthinkable" in the present state of science, he said, for his , the
Centre National d'Etudes Spatiales (CNES) French.
Cosmic window
That discovery, in 2011
which earned them the Nobel Prize in Physics to Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and
Brian Schmidt for their cosmological observations, is what the second half of
2020 is preparing to study Euclid. The "engine" of this acceleration
appears to be the dark energy is still not understood, much less understood
than dark matter.
"The formal
adoption of the mission is a milestone for the scientific community," said
the head of ESA's Science, Spanish Alvaro Giménez Cañete.
The science of Euclid
"constitute a unique catalog of several billions of stars and galaxies
distributed throughout the sky on either side of the Milky Way," the CNES.
"That will open a
window on the formation of the first galaxies more than 12,000 million years
and represent an almost inexhaustible source of unique information for the
world astronomical community for decades to come," he added.
From now on, ESA
prepares the contest for companies involved in aerospace technology to present
their bids to develop the software required for Euclid.
"We are one step
closer to knowing the darkest secrets of the Universe", summed Laureijs
René, one of the scientists involved in the project europeo.EFE
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