The Euclid mission will probe dark energy and dark matter like never before, setting the stage for an international, multiobservatory push to solve some of the universe's deepest mysteries
The universe is expanding too fast. Or is it doing so too slow? Or maybe its expansion is just a steady, ominous trundle toward a long-distant nothingness. Cosmologists have grappled with these distinctly different possibilities for generations. Now, at last, the truth may be in sight.
On July 1, around 11 A.M. EDT, the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope is set to launch from Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The $1.5-billion mission has had a tough time of late. Euclid was supposed to lift off last year on a Russian Soyuz rocket, but following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, ESA pulled the plug on the launch and ended its collaborations with Russia. “We were really stranded,” says Giuseppe Racca, Euclid’s project manager at ESA.
Observing in both visible and near-infrared light, Euclid will not only image galaxies but also precisely measure the age of about 30 million of them by picking apart their light in a technique called spectroscopy. The goal of the mission is to produce a map of these galaxies across the universe and probe their apparent shapes, which can be warped by the intervening dark-matter-suffused space their light has travelled through.
A century later, that blunder looks like an eerily prescient prediction of dark energy. Its exact value, known as w, remains an open question. The most simplistic model says w is –1, meaning the universe will continue expanding at a steadily accelerating rate forever. But if the value deviates slightly, it could point to a universe that will accelerate exponentially, eventually tearing itself apart, or one that will eventually decelerate and collapse in on itself.
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