European survey reveals 900m galaxies – and possibly secrets of ‘dark universe’
The European Space Agency's Euclid mission has released data revealing more than 900 million galaxies and 15,000 potential cases of strong gravitational lensing, which could help unlock secrets of the dark universe.
Launched in July 2023, the European Space Agency's Euclid mission has delivered its first major data release, revealing over 900 million galaxies and approximately 15,000 potential cases of strong gravitational lensing.
Cosmic Mapping
The mission promises to create the largest ever 3D map of the universe, encompassing a third of the sky and more than 10 billion years of cosmic history. While previous telescopes like Hubble have produced images of incredible resolution, they don't cover as large an area of the sky as Euclid.
The technological leap that's Euclid is that we can keep that high resolution, but now we can basically map huge volumes of the sky, huge volumes of the universe.
Dark Universe Secrets
The newly released data covers about 14% of the total area of sky that Euclid will ultimately map, capturing more than 60 million potential quasars as well. It also includes candidates for strong gravitational lensing, a phenomenon predicted by Einstein where a foreground galaxy distorts space-time, bending light from a background galaxy.
This effect is significantly boosted by the presence of dark matter, which increases the mass and gravitational influence of a galaxy. By studying these lensing cases, scientists may be able to determine different theories about the nature of dark matter.
With strong gravitational lensing, you find out how the dark matter is clumping and that's very diagnostic of the type of matter that it is, because different types of matter can clump in very different ways.
Future Discoveries
The Euclid data contains about 15,000 probable cases of strong gravitational lensing, with an estimated 170,000 expected to be discovered by the end of the mission. This represents a significant increase from the approximately 1,000 cases previously known to experts.
A further data release is expected next summer, which will include results on both the distribution of galaxies and weak gravitational lensing. Scientists plan to use these distortions to create a map of dark matter throughout the universe and compare the results with different theories.
The sheer volume of data is now too large for any single human to analyze completely. "No human eyeball is able to look at all of the Euclid data any more. It's now too big," Taylor noted, emphasizing the vast potential for future discoveries in this unprecedented cosmic survey.
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