Euclid space telescope successfully launched Saturday aboard a SpaceX rocket and is on its way to a position about 1.5 million kilometres from Earth
A brilliant morning at Cape Canaveral in Florida served as backdrop for the successful launch of the Euclid mission on Saturday, an effort by researchers to uncovering one of the universe’s darkest secrets.
“Our number one goal is focused around dark energy,” said Dr. Percival. “We want to understand what it is. We want to know why the expansion of the universe is accelerating.”It’s been nearly a century since Edwin Hubble first clocked the speeds of distant galaxies and showed that space – but not the stuff in it – is getting larger at a measurable rate. The process was initiated by the Big Bang, the explosive event that gave rise to the universe.
Will Percival, an astrophysicist at the University of Waterloo, is the Canadian principal investigator for the European Space Agency's Euclid mission. Behind him is a photo of the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope, which is providing data on galaxies in support of the mission to understand the nature of dark energy.Theorists have speculated about the nature of dark energy and what it means for the fate of the universe.
As dismal as that may seem, this is the scenario that best fits what astronomers have observed thus far. But there is also a chance that a more precise reading of the phenomenon would show that dark energy is changing over time, and may even shut off at some point in the future.
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