Floating in the middle of our galaxy, near the center of the Milky Way, inside a cloud of gas that swirls at the temperature of 100 Kelvin or -279.67 Fahrenheit, a molecule essential to life on Earth has just been discovered. It sounds inconceivable that such a level of cosmic cold could harbor anything remotely related to a living organism—and yet it does. In fact, without this molecule, humans—and all other breathing, growing things on the planet—would not be possible.
The molecule, which scientists have been trying to detect in space for decades, is carbonic acid, a precursor to amino acids, the basic building blocks of proteins. Its chemical formula is H2CO3. Hardly a household name, carbonic acid nonetheless is key to our capacity to breathe: It ferrets carbon dioxide from our blood into our lungs, where it can be exhaled into the atmosphere. It also plays important roles in various geological processes on Earth. An excess of the molecule in the oceans can lead to ocean acidification. “So while it’s important to life itself, it’s even more important in several atmospheric and geological processes,” says Miguel Sanz-Novo at the Spanish Astrobiology Centre in Madrid. Sanz-Novo’s team confirmed the presence of carbonic acid in space for the first time, publishing their findings in a pre-peer review site called Arxiv.
The findings bolster Panspermia, the theory that life on Earth takes its origin from space and that our planet was “seeded” by various cosmic molecules that took a ride on meteors and meteorites, which later gave rise to organisms.
“The discovery of carbonic acid in space certainly tells us that the chemical ingredients for life are present out there, in the gas that will form new stars and planetary systems,” says Víctor Rivilla, the primary investigator on the project. “So yes, they could have been incorporated into solar system objects such as comets and asteroids, which could have transported them to the early Earth, thus helping to cook the life recipe.”
Our planet may have been “seeded” by various cosmic molecules.
Carbonic acid belongs to a larger group of carboxylic acids. Its close cousins, formic acid and acetic acid, were first spotted in space in 1971 and 1997, respectively. Scientists suspect that H2CO3 exists in various astronomical environments such as the Galilean icy moons, Mercury’s north polar regions, or even on the surface or atmosphere of Mars—but its presence in space was harder to pinpoint. “This molecule was thought to exist in space somewhere, and now our investigation showed that it is in fact there,” says Sanz-Novo—in the gas from which new stars and planets will eventually form. Moreover, it seems to be quite abundant, Sanz-Novo adds.
Floating inside a cloud named G+0.693-0.027 about 100,000 light-years away from Earth, carbonic acid molecules weren’t easy to discern (researchers used spectroscopy to identify them). Inside that cloud, the molecule exists in a high-energy state, which allows it to do things that it could never do on Earth: For example, as it spins in this high-energy state, it emits photons—massless particles that comprise waves of electromagnetic radiation—with a set frequency. That frequency becomes its spectral fingerprint or a mugshot, explains Sanz-Novo. Detected by two telescopes, at IRAM and Yebes observatories in Spain, and printed on paper, the fingerprint looks almost like a QR code.
Even here on Earth, H2CO3 is not easy to study because in ambient settings of temperature and pressure it easily breaks apart into carbon dioxide and water. To obtain a spectral fingerprint of the molecule in the lab to compare to the telescope’s data, the team also had to get the molecule to a high-energy state so it would start spitting out photons.
The findings aren’t only interesting from the perspective of where life came from, Rivilla adds. They also hint that we may have cosmic neighbors—the comets and asteroids most certainly took the molecules to other planets where they could develop into other life forms. “We all want to know how life could have appeared on our planet—and also if it is or is not a unique event,” he says.
The findings add another piece to the puzzle of whether we are alone in the universe—or not.
Darwin didn't perceive the larger, all-encompassing order – the layered, nestled, hierarchical space-time matter-energy bioelectrical harmonic webbed nexuses of holonic planes and dimensions – via which the processes of evolution unfold, without which the processes of evolution could not engender ever more complex life, sentience, and consciousness: but for the proto-order somehow embedded in the Big Seed, blind, unguided evolutionism is incapable of producing anything other than entropic chaos. Evolution is more akin to cosmic / élan vital processes, initiated by whatever entity / force that begot the Big Seed; it is undeniable that the cosmos has gradually, incrementally, spontaneously self-organized – from the very small to the very large – and that mankind are teleologically unfolding parts of this gradual, spontaneous, incremental, punctuated, self-organized expansion.
The visible Universe extends 46.1 billion light-years from us, while we've probed scales down to as small as ~10^-19 meters.
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
On the smallest of physical scales, we have the fundamental, elementary particles, which build up to assemble nuclei, atoms, molecules, and even larger structures. On larger scales, we have planets, stars, stellar systems, galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and vast voids between them, all contributing to the enormous cosmic web. Overall, there are many different scales to view the Universe on. Here's the grand cosmic tour, from the extremely tiny to the unfathomably large.
Our Universe spans from subatomic to cosmic scales. All told, 13 different scales are presently known.
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1.) Fundamental, elementary particles. Down to 10-19 meters, these quanta have never been divided.
On the right, the gauge bosons, which mediate the three fundamental quantum forces of our Universe, are illustrated. There is only one photon to mediate the electromagnetic force, there are three bosons mediating the weak force, and eight mediating the strong force. This suggests that the Standard Model is a combination of three groups: U(1), SU(2), and SU(3), whose interactions and particles combine to make up everything known in existence. Each of the known fundamental particles can be no larger than about ~10^-19 meters.
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2.) Nuclear scales. On femtometer (~10-15 m) scales, individual nucleons, composed of quarks and gluons, bind together.
The journey from macroscopic scales down to subatomic ones spans many orders of magnitude, but going down in small steps can make each new one more accessible from the previous one. Humans are made of organs, cells, organelles, molecules, atoms, then electrons and nuclei, then protons and neutrons, and then quarks and gluons inside of them. This is the limit to how far we’ve ever probed nature.
When two protons, each one made of three quarks held together by gluons, overlap, it’s possible that they can fuse together into a composite state dependent on their properties. The most common, stable possibility is to produce a deuteron, made of a proton and a neutron, which requires the emission of a neutrino, a positron, and possibly a photon as well.
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3.) Atomic scales. Angstrom-sized (~10-10 m), atoms compose all matter on Earth.
Although you yourself are made of atoms, what you experience as “touch” doesn’t necessarily require another, external atom to come in actual overlapping contact with the atoms in your body. Simply getting close enough to exert a force is not only enough, it’s what most commonly occurs.
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4.) Molecular scales. Nanometers (~10-9 m) and larger, molecules contain multiple atoms bound together.
Molecules, examples of particles of matter linked up into complex configurations, attain the shapes and structures that they do owing primarily to the electromagnetic forces that exist between their constituent atoms and electrons. The variety of structures that can be created is almost limitless.
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5.) Microscopic scales. Below 0.0001 meters (human hair width), tools beyond human eyes are required.
This tunneling electron microscope image shows a few specimens of the cyanobacterium species Prochlorococcus marinus. Each one of these organisms is only about half a micron in size, but all together, cyanobacteria are largely responsible for the creation of Earth’s oxygen: both initially and largely even during the present day. Like all bacteria, their lifetime is much, much shorter than the lifetime of a human.
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6.) Macroscopic scales. Our conventional perceptions extend from sub-millimeter to several kilometer scales.
In warm, shallow bodies of water, pink flamingos can often be found wading, preening, and searching for food. The lack of carotenoid pigments in their food supply, notable in some (but not all) of the flamingos shown here, causes many of these particular flamingos to be closer to a white color than a more stereotypical pink or red, but the behavior of standing on one foot instead of two does successfully cut their body heat loss nearly in half.
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7.) Sub-planetary scales. Where gravity cannot defeat electromagnetism, free-floating bodies can reach several hundred kilometers.
This selection of asteroids and comets visited by spacecraft spans many orders of magnitude in size, from sub-kilometer bodies to objects more than 100 km on a side. However, none of these objects have enough mass to be pulled into a round shape. Gravitation can hold them together, but electromagnetic forces are primarily responsible for their shapes.
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8.) Planetary scales. Spheroidal because of self-gravitation, planets are typically ~1000-200,000 kilometers across.
Now that Saturn has been imaged by JWST, the first “family portrait” of the gas giant worlds as seen by JWST’s eyes can be composed. Here, each planet is shown with an angular size that’s calibrated to how they would appear relative to one another as seen by JWST. Planets can be as large as about twice Jupiter’s size, but may be as small as 1000 km or even less.
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9.) Star-sized scales. From 0.08-to-2000 times the Sun’s size, these nuclear furnaces light up the Universe.
Brown dwarfs, between about 0.013-0.080 solar masses, will fuse deuterium+deuterium into helium-3 or tritium, remaining at the same approximate size as Jupiter but achieving much greater masses. Red dwarfs are only slightly larger, but even the Sun-like star shown here is not shown to scale here; it would have about 7 times the diameter of a low-mass star. Stars can be up to nearly 2000 times the diameter of our Sun within this Universe.
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10.) Stellar system scales. Extending up to ~2 light-years away, extended Oort-like clouds probe the limits of individual stellar systems.
An illustration of the inner and outer Oort Cloud surrounding our Sun. While the inner Oort Cloud is torus-shaped, the outer Oort Cloud is spherical. The true extent of the outer Oort Cloud may be under 1 light-year, or greater than 3 light-years; there is a tremendous uncertainty here. Any massive object that passes through the Oort cloud has a significant chance of perturbing the objects within its vicinity.
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11.) Galactic scales. From ~100-to-1,000,000 light-years, normal and dark matter hold galaxies together.
While there are many instances of numerous galaxies in the same region of space, they normally occur either between two galaxies only or in very dense regions of space, like at the centers of galaxy clusters. Seeing 5 galaxies interacting within a space of less than 1 million light-years is an extreme rarity, captured in gorgeous detail by Hubble here. As all of these galaxies are still forming new stars, they’re all classified as “alive” by astronomers.
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12.) Cluster-and-void scales. 10-to-100 million light-years wide, they’re the largest gravitationally bound structures.
In between the great clusters and filaments of the Universe are great cosmic voids, some of which can span hundreds of millions of light-years in diameter. While some voids are larger in extent than others, spanning a billion light-years or more, they all contain matter at some level. Even the void that houses MCG+01–02–015, the loneliest galaxy in the Universe, likely contains small, low surface brightness galaxies that are below the present detection limit of telescopes like Hubble.
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13.) Truly cosmic scales. The fully observable cosmic web extends ~92 billion light-years across.
On the largest scales, the way galaxies cluster together observationally (blue and purple) cannot be matched by simulations (red) unless dark matter is included. Although there are ways to reproduce this type of structure without specifically including dark matter, such as by adding a specific type of field, those alternatives either look suspiciously indistinguishable to dark matter or fail to reproduce one of the many other observations in support of dark matter.
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On even larger and smaller scales, new phenomena may still await discovery.
"As all of these galaxies are still forming new stars, they’re all classified as 'alive' by astronomers."
The far-right populist Alternative for Germany party rejects a values-based foreign policy, just as much as it rejects NATO and the US. That approach has attracted the attention of Beijing.
A high-ranking three-member delegation from the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party recently traveled to China — on an official invitation. AfD co-leader Alice Weidel and her Bundestag federal parliamentary colleagues, Petr Bystron and Peter Felser, spent almost a week in Beijing and Shanghai at the end of June.
Upon their return, Felser told DW that he supposed it was his party's good results in the German polls which had sparked the interest of the Chinese. The AfD is currently polling more than 20% nationwide.
"The AfD sees the traditional Western ties with the United States, which it regards as hegemonic, as having past their use-by date."
Party head Weidel let it be known that their Chinese contacts had been very well-informed about the work of the AfD.
Weidel herself knows the People's Republic of China very well. She spent six years living there on a German Academic Exchange Service scholarship and completed her doctorate on the Chinese pension system, before moving on to work for Goldman Sachs. Today, she praises the entrepreneurial spirit of the Chinese.
She has also ridiculed German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock's criticism of the human rights situation in China.
"God help us: Baerbock is on a new mission in #China. She wants to emphasize the 'shared European conviction.' This already fails because it is not only #France which does not share this conviction..." she wrote on X (formerly known as Twitter) when Baerbock traveled there in April.
AfD critical of Germany's China Strategy
The AfD has positioned itself in opposition to the German government's critical policy toward China. Berlin's China Strategy, published in mid-July, for example, was denounced by Bystron, the AfD's foreign policy spokesperson, as the "attempt to implement green-woke ideology and US geopolitical interests under the guise of a strategy for German foreign policy."
The description of China in the strategy as a rival — as well as a partner and competitor — was for Bystron "the consequence of the US' confrontational course toward China. This confrontation and division are not in the interests of Germany as an export nation," he said.
For political scientist Wolfgang Schroeder from the University of Kassel, the AfD's foreign policy positions demonstrate an attempt to set itself apart from the other German political parties. Geopolitically, said Schroeder, the AfD sees the traditional Western ties with the United States, which it regards as hegemonic, as having past their use-by date.
"The AfD considers Washington to be more part of the problem than part of the solution to the challenges facing Germany," he told DW. "That's because the AfD considers the US an imperial actor whose vested interests cannot be reconciled with those of Germany."
For AfD, human rights criticism 'totally irrelevant'
In China, according to AfD's Felser, the lawmakers told their Chinese contacts that the AfD does not like it "when someone travels all over the world and then wants to impose their values upon others."
For Schroeder, this attitude comes as no surprise. "AfD politicians describe the criticism of human rights in China as totally irrelevant, as quixotic. For them, every country has its own problem areas and other countries should not interfere," he said.
After returning from China, party head Weidel announced that she wanted to keep the lines of communication with Beijing open. It will perhaps help that cause that, in late July, the AfD chose Maximilian Krah as its top candidate for the 2024 European Parliament elections.
The member of the European Parliament from Saxony, who aligns himself with the right-wing side of his party, has attracted attention in the past for multiple pro-China statements. Perhaps that's why Krah is also glad to be interviewed by Chinese media, such as by the Global Times in November 2022.
"The anti-China forces in Germany do not represent the interests of Germany," he told the state-run English language publication. "Decoupling from China would serve only the interests of America and damage our own industry severely."
AfD 'understands, accepts Chinese way of governing'
"To a certain extent, the AfD is presenting itself as the authentic force bringing German interests to bear in the geopolitical constellation and which understands and accepts the Chinese way of governing, of living, of organizing authority because they are a result of Chinese development," said Schroeder.
A rural community about halfway between Moscow and St. Petersburg has been selected as the location of an “African village,” according to the African International Congress in Russia. The project is a part of a five-year pilot program to settle thousands of migrants from South Africa.
African diplomats joined AIC representatives and local officials from Tver Region last week for a ceremony unveiling the symbolic cornerstone of the village, set to be built near the hamlet of Porechye.
“We plan to establish 30 settlements in Russia for Afrikaners who want to immigrate,” said the head of the Eurasian International University (EIU) and general representative of the AIC in Russia, Konstantin Klimenko.
“These are Boers, farmers of European origin, whose ancestors settled in Africa many years ago,” Klimenko explained. “Many of them are now converting to Orthodoxy and moving to Russia, attracted by our moral and spiritual way of life, with traditional family values.”
The Afrovillage is part of the pilot project currently underway in the Moscow and Tver regions, with the goal of settling about 3,000 Boer families. If successful, the AIC and its partners plan to expand it to other regions of Russia.
In May, a Russian immigration lawyer revealed plans for an “American village” in southern Moscow Region for 200 families of conservatives fleeing political and religious persecution in the US.
Afrikaners are descended from Dutch colonists who first settled around Cape Town in the mid-1650s. They became notorious for a system of racial segregation called ‘apartheid’ (1948-1994) that began under British rule but continued after South African independence was recognized. The country is currently ruled by the black majority, consisting of Bantu groups such as the Xhosa, Zulu and Ndebele.
Though the construction on the actual Afrovillage has yet to begin, the project organizers are working to set up a support system for the settlers. Starting September 1, the EIU will launch an online program for learning Russian for about 200 settlers, Klimenko said.
Meanwhile, the program organizers have partnered with a local farmer, Alexei Trofimov, to set up the ‘Milkburg’ cheesery near the future village. The first settlers, who plan to be dairy farmers, will be able to get their supplies from Trofimov and sell their products through Milkburg.
The settlement project appears to be unrelated to the expansion of economic and educational opportunities for the continent that Russian President Vladimir Putin announced at last month’s Russia-Africa Summit in St. Petersburg.
In May, a Russian immigration lawyer revealed plans for an “American village” in southern Moscow Region for 200 families of conservatives fleeing political and religious persecution in the US.
The universe we live in is a transparent one, where light from stars and galaxies shines bright against a clear, dark backdrop. But this wasn’t always the case – in its early years, the universe was filled with a fog of hydrogen atoms that obscured light from the earliest stars and galaxies.
The intense ultraviolet light from the first generations of stars and galaxies is thought to have burned through the hydrogen fog, transforming the universe into what we see today. While previous generations of telescopes lacked the ability to study those early cosmic objects, astronomers are now using the James Webb Space Telescope’s superior technology to study the stars and galaxies that formed in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang Seed.
I’m an astronomer who studies the farthest galaxies in the universe using the world’s foremost ground- and space-based telescopes. Using new observations from the Webb telescope and a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, my team confirmed the existence of the faintest galaxy currently known in the early universe. The galaxy, called JD1, is seen as it was when the universe was only 480 million years old, or 4% of its present age.
A brief history of the early universe
The first billion years of the universe’s life were a crucial period in its evolution. In the first moments after the Big Bang Seed, matter and light were bound to each other in a hot, dense “soup” of fundamental particles.
However, a fraction of a second after the Big Bang Seed, the universe expanded extremely rapidly. This expansion eventually allowed the universe to cool enough for light and matter to separate out of their “soup” and – some 380,000 years later – form hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen atoms appeared as an intergalactic fog, and with no light from stars and galaxies, the universe was dark. This period is known as the cosmic dark ages.
The arrival of the first generations of stars and galaxies several hundred million years after the Big Bang Seed bathed the universe in extremely hot UV light, which burned – or ionized – the hydrogen fog. This process yielded the transparent, complex and beautiful universe we see today.
Astronomers like me call the first billion years of the universe – when this hydrogen fog was burning away – the epoch of reionization. To fully understand this time period, we study when the first stars and galaxies formed, what their main properties were and whether they were able to produce enough UV light to burn through all the hydrogen.
The search for faint galaxies in the early universe
The first step toward understanding the epoch of reionization is finding and confirming the distances to galaxies that astronomers think might be responsible for this process. Since light travels at a finite speed, it takes time to arrive to our telescopes, so astronomers see objects as they were in the past.
For example, light from the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, takes about 27,000 years to reach us on Earth, so we see it as it was 27,000 years in the past. That means that if we want to see back to the very first instants after the Big Bang Seed (the universe is 13.8 billion years old), we have to look for objects at extreme distances.
Because galaxies residing in this time period are so far away, they appear extremely faint and small to our telescopes and emit most of their light in the infrared. This means astronomers need powerful infrared telescopes like Webb to find them. Prior to Webb, virtually all of the distant galaxies found by astronomers were exceptionally bright and large, simply because our telescopes weren’t sensitive enough to see the fainter, smaller galaxies.
The first billion years of the universe’s life were a crucial period in its evolution.
However, it’s the latter population that are far more numerous, representative and likely to be the main drivers to the reionization process, not the bright ones. So, these faint galaxies are the ones astronomers need to study in greater detail. It’s like trying to understand the evolution of humans by studying entire populations rather than a few very tall people. By allowing us to see faint galaxies, Webb is opening a new window into studying the early universe.
A typical early galaxy
JD1 is one such “typical” faint galaxy. It was discovered in 2014 with the Hubble Space Telescope as a suspect distant galaxy. But Hubble didn’t have the capabilities or sensitivity to confirm its distance – it could make only an educated guess.
Small and faint nearby galaxies can sometimes be mistaken as distant ones, so astronomers need to be sure of their distances before we can make claims about their properties. Distant galaxies therefore remain “candidates” until they are confirmed. The Webb telescope finally has the capabilities to confirm these, and JD1 was one of the first major confirmations by Webb of an extremely distant galaxy candidate found by Hubble. This confirmation ranks it as the faintest galaxy yet seen in the early universe.
This process yielded the transparent, complex and beautiful universe we see today.
To confirm JD1, an international team of astronomers and I used Webb’s near-infrared spectrograph, NIRSpec, to obtain an infrared spectrum of the galaxy. The spectrum allowed us to pinpoint the distance from Earth and determine its age, the number of young stars it formed and the amount of dust and heavy elements that it produced.
Gravitational lensing, nature’s magnifying glass
Even for Webb, JD1 would be impossible to see without a helping hand from nature. JD1 is located behind a large cluster of nearby galaxies, called Abell 2744, whose combined gravitational strength bends and amplifies the light from JD1. This effect, known as gravitational lensing, makes JD1 appear larger and 13 times brighter than it ordinarily would.
Without gravitational lensing, astronomers would not have seen JD1, even with Webb. The combination of JD1’s gravitational magnification and new images from another one of Webb’s near-infrared instruments, NIRCam, made it possible for our team to study the galaxy’s structure in unprecedented detail and resolution.
Not only does this mean we as astronomers can study the inner regions of early galaxies, it also means we can start determining whether such early galaxies were small, compact and isolated sources, or if they were merging and interacting with nearby galaxies. By studying these galaxies, we are tracing back to the building blocks that shaped the universe and gave rise to our cosmic home.
The spacecraft’s two instruments took the preliminary test images, revealing scintillating starry views that prove everything onboard is in tip-top shape.
“After more than 11 years of designing and developing Euclid, it’s exhilarating and enormously emotional to see these first images,” said Giuseppe Racca, Euclid project manager at the European Space Agency, in a statement.
“It’s even more incredible when we think that we see just a few galaxies here, produced with minimum system tuning. The fully calibrated Euclid will ultimately observe billions of galaxies to create the biggest ever 3D map of the sky.”
Euclid, the European Space Agency’s newest observatory, has spent the past month since its July 1 launch traveling to its orbital point, located 1 million miles (1.5 million kilometers) away from Earth.
The 4-foot-diameter (1.2-meter-diameter) telescope will remain at what’s known as the sun-Earth Langrangian point L2, also home to NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, a partnership with ESA and the Canadian Space Agency. Euclid will keep pace with Earth as our planet orbits the sun.
Scientists are already encouraged by the capabilities showcased by Euclid’s initial images, which demonstrate that the telescope may exceed expectations.
“It is fantastic to see the latest addition to ESA’s fleet of science missions already performing so well,” said ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher, in a statement. “I have full confidence that the team behind the mission will succeed in using Euclid to reveal so much about the 95% of the Universe that we currently know so little about.”
Wide-field and infrared cameras
Euclid will spend the next two months testing and calibrating its instruments — a visible-light camera and a near-infrared camera/spectrometer — before surveying about one-third of the sky for the next six years.
The telescope’s visible instrument, or VIS, will take images of billions of galaxies, something hinted at in one of the initial test images. Euclid’s wide perspective can record data from a part of the sky more than 100 times bigger than what Webb’s camera can capture. The telescope’s image quality will be at least four times sharper than those of ground-based sky surveys.
“Ground-based tests do not give you images of galaxies or stellar clusters, but here they all are in this one field,” said Reiko Nakajima, Euclid VIS instrument scientist, in a statement. “It is beautiful to look at, and a joy to do so with the people we’ve worked together with for so long.”
When the VIS instrument switched on for the first time, the team was shocked to see an unexpected light pattern in the images, which was determined to be sunlight creeping in through a tiny gap. As long as Euclid remains oriented in a specific way, VIS won’t encounter any light contamination in its images.
Meanwhile, the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer instrument, or NISP, will capture images of galaxies in infrared light and measurements that map the distance of each galaxy.
“Each new image we uncover leaves me utterly amazed. And I admit that I enjoy listening to the expressions of awe from others in the room when they look at this data,” said William Gillard, Euclid NISP instrument scientist, in a statement.
Investigating invisible dark matter
Euclid’s primary goal is to observe the cosmic mysteries of the universe, including dark matter and dark energy.
While dark matter has never actually been detected, it is believed to make up at least 85% of the total matter in the universe. Meanwhile, dark energy is a mysterious force thought to play a role in the accelerating expansion of the universe.
In the 1920s, astronomers Georges Lemaître and Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe has been expanding since its birth 13.8 billion years ago. But research that began in the 1990s has shown that something sparked an acceleration of the universe’s expansion about 6 billion years ago, and the cause remains a mystery.
Unlocking the true nature of dark energy and dark matter could help astronomers understand what the universe is made of, how its expansion has changed over time, and whether there is more to understanding gravity than meets the eye. Both dark matter and dark energy also play a role in the distribution and movement of objects, such as galaxies and stars, across the cosmos.
Euclid is designed to create the largest and most accurate three-dimensional map of the universe. The mission will observe billions of galaxies that stretch 10 billion light-years away to reveal how matter may have been stretched and pulled apart by dark energy over time. These observations will effectively allow Euclid to see how the universe has evolved over the past 10 billion years.
The telescope was named in honor of Euclid of Alexandria, the Greek mathematician who lived around 300 BC and is considered the father of geometry.
As Euclid makes its observations, the telescope will create a catalog of about 1.5 billion galaxies and the stars within them. The observatory will capture a treasure trove of data for astronomers that includes each galaxy’s shape, mass and number of stars created per year. Euclid’s ability to see in near-infrared light, similar to Webb, could also reveal previously unseen objects in our own Milky Way galaxy, such as brown dwarfs and ultra-cool stars.
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