Euclid space telescope unveils new images of the cosmos

AFP | Paris, France

The Daily Tribune – www.newsofbahrain.com

A mind-boggling number of shining galaxies, a purple and orange star nursery and a spiral galaxy similar to our Milky Way: new images were revealed from Europe’s Euclid space telescope yesterday.

It is the second set of images released by the European Space Agency since Euclid launched last year on the first-ever mission to investigate the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Scientific results were also published for the first time in the six-year mission, which aims to use its wide view to chart two billion galaxies across a third of the sky.

Euclid project scientist Rene Laureijs told AFP that he was “personally most excited” about the image of a massive cluster of galaxies called Abell 2390. The image of the cluster, which is 2.7 billion light years away from Earth, encompasses more than 50,000 galaxies. Just one galaxy -- such as our own -- can be home to hundreds of billions or even trillions of stars. Abell 2390 alone contains the mass of around 10 trillion suns, Jason Rhodes of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory told an online press conference.

The image also pointed towards traces of dark matter, whose invisible presence can only be detected by looking at how its gravity distorts light. “There’s so much dark matter in this cluster that it severely bends the light from some of these background galaxies,” making them appear curved, Rhodes said.

Dark matter and dark energy are thought to make up 95 percent of the universe but we know almost nothing about them. Another way the Abell 2390 image hinted at dark matter was by revealing the faint light of “orphan stars” drifting between the galaxy clusters.

These stars are ejected from the galaxies, “creating a kind of cloud which surrounds the entire cluster,” French scientist Jean-Charles Cuillandre told AFP. Astronomers believe this strange phenomenon indicates the presence of dark matter between the galaxies.