What a new satellite could reveal about the most mysterious parts of the universe | DW News

shining a light on the dark side of the universe that's the task of a new Mission by the European Space Agency that's set to launch on Saturday Euclid aims to find out more about two of the universe's greatest Mysteries dark energy and dark matter [Music] the Euclid Mission aims to investigate the most mysterious forces of our universe dark matter and dark energy unlocking the secrets of these invisible forces will greatly increase our understanding of space double matter responsible for stars nebula and galaxies makes up less than five percent of the universe the remaining 95 is invisible the theory is that dark matter Works a bit like glue holding stars and galaxies together dark energy on the other hand drives the accelerating expansion of our universe these mysterious forces are only identifiable by their effects to gain insight into them Euclid has to investigate as much of the universe as possible what Euclid needs to do is to look at the very large part of the universe it has the mission as being optimized in the end to look at about 35 percent of the overall sky our universe was created during the so-called Big Bang all the structures that astronomers see today were formed from evenly distributed gas influenced by dark matter and dark energy Euclid will operate roughly one and a half million kilometers from Earth on our planet's Dark Side this vantage point will grant its telescope a largely unobstructed look into deep space Euclid will collect data from billions of galaxies in various stages of evolution and in the process it will get a picture from 10 billion years ago that's how long light from the most distant clusters of stars takes to reach the telescope the gathered data will reveal how exactly dark matter is distributed in space and how the proportion of dark energy has changed over time is a mission which will produce really a huge amount of information which will serve not only cosmology by the way but will will serve Galactic studies we serve all sorts of other other Sciences astronomy astronomy signs the Euclid Mission will run for around six years and is widely expected to transform our understanding of the universe exciting stuff and Keith cowing is here to dig into it a little deeper he's the editor of spacerift.com and joins us from Washington D.C good to see you again Keith so a telescope setting out to map invisible matter and energy that sounds like quite a task what will Euclid be able to reveal about these mysterious parts of the universe well I like the German term better Dunkle Materia it just sounds a little more you know mysterious than just Dark Matter Dark Energy but uh your introductory piece was rather good in just showing the rather Cosmic if I can use that word uh implications of this it's sort of like if you've got a cat and it gets in a bag and you hear it and you go out you see the bag moving around you think it's your cat you're not sure you can't see the cat but you can see the bag moving around and the effect it has on things that's where we still are with regards to Dark Matter Dark Energy we obviously see the universe we see stars and planets you see them doing things that make some sense but then you're saying why does it do this if I can't see that so Euclid along with other telescopes like the Nancy Grace Roman telescope that NASA will launch and other observatories are all going to sort of gang up on this question over the next half a decade why is it so important to understand dark matter and dark energy well again it's sort of like we can only see a few percent of what's out there in there within us where we came from where we're going and we have an idea how things work but they're sort of like they was it the ghost of the machine we don't see everything we don't see all the particles that are making galaxies do what they do and if you want to know how things really work you need to find out what that remaining 90 to 95 percent is this telescope this Mission along with others will make a big dedicated stab at that issue it's really the first time that we've spent this much money and time on a spacecraft to do this yeah the Euclid project manager whom we just saw in the report actually called it a cosmic embarrassment that we still don't know what happens in 95 of the universe how is Euclid different um to previous space telescopes well this is the sort of thing where Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking and all the smart guys were all scratching their head so this is a this is and Carl say again and everybody else this is the big as biggest of big questions that I can think of other than where the universe came from and we won't wear that no that answer until we figure this one out so yeah but this this is this is one of those rewriting the textbooks sort of things we won't know exactly how to be Rewritten yet but that's something that if we talk again in four or five or six years we may be talking about those Keith cowing editor spaceref.com many things always great speaking to you bye okay

Channel: DW News

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Id: fBNKp-HIFYE

Length: 5min 57sec (357 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 30 2023