The European Euclid Space Telescope will make some 50,000 galaxy observations during its six-year mission, a task that included the Institute for Astrophysics and Space Sciences (IA) in its planning.
The AI leads the Portuguese participation in the mission of the European Space Agency (ESA) that will launch on Saturday, from the United States, if all goes according to plan, the telescope that will explore the dark and unknown side of the Universe. .
For the first time, Portugal occupies a prominent place in an ESA space mission, an agency of which it has been a member since 2000.
Portugal’s collaboration with Euclid began in 2012 when the country signed a multilateral agreement with ESA and other representatives of a consortium formed to develop, build and operate the space telescope.
Since then, more than 40 Portuguese researchers and master’s and doctoral students have been working on the mission.
António da Silva, an AI researcher and professor at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon (FCUL), is the representative of Portugal on the board of the Euclid consortium.
For Lusa, the cosmologist justified the importance of the space mission, explaining that “it was designed to seek answers to simple scientific questions, but truly enigmatic and with profound implications at the level of fundamental physics, cosmology and astrophysics.”
“Until today we don’t really know how galaxies are distributed in the Universe or why they indicate that the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate,” he said.
According to António da Silva, several questions arise.
“What physical mechanisms cause this acceleration? What role do dark energy and gravity play in this expansion? Is Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity correct? And what is dark matter? How does it relate to models of high-energy physics and particles seeking to describe the Universe shortly after the Big Bang [teoria cosmológica sobre o desenvolvimento inicial do Universo]?”, he listed.
Scientists estimate that almost all (95%) of the Universe is made up of dark energy and matter, “unknown components in the light of current physics,” according to the researcher.
To “shed light” on the dark Universe, the Euclid telescope will observe in detail, 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, billions of galaxies, on which dark matter and energy generate effects on their structure, shape , distribution, movement and evolution.
The telescope will collect visible light, but also invisible to the human eye, from galaxies and clusters of galaxies, including the most distant ones, formed in some cases 10,000 million years ago, when the Universe was taking “its first steps” (the Universe 13,800 years ago millions of years).
The Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences was part of the group in charge of preparing the sky monitoring calendar with some 50,000 observations made by the telescope, determining which region of the sky Euclid will observe at each moment of the mission.
Together, the IA and FCUL produced the ‘software’ that generates the timeline of the telescope’s orientations in space and the observing times for the mission schedule, which will extend until about 2030.
After the launch of Euclid, the observation plan will be updated by a support team for sky survey operations, led by both Portuguese institutions.
All updates will be sent regularly to ESA so that the flight operations center can point the telescope in the right direction for what it intends to observe in deep space.
The AI also coordinates the scientific groups that will use the data obtained for purposes other than those of the space mission and participates in the coordination of theoretical physics, gravitational lensing and galaxy cluster studies.
“The large number of galaxies and spectra obtained will constitute a legacy, including stellar populations of nearby galaxies, morphologies, masses, star formation rates, among many other parameters that are also very valuable in various fields of Astrophysics. All this makes Euclid a unique and structuring mission for European science, capable of bringing together the interests of the Cosmology, Astrophysics and Fundamental Physics communities,” said António da Silva.
By performing the widest and most accurate three-dimensional mapping of the Universe in time and space ever, covering more than a third of the sky and going back up to 10 billion years, the telescope “will allow characterization of the dynamic properties of the dark components ” of the Universe and, with it, paving the way for the development of “new models of particle physics and high energies that enter into the models of evolution of the Universe shortly after the Big Bang and up to the present”, according to the Portuguese expert.
For António da Silva, such discoveries “may not only revolutionize the understanding” of the “critical phase of the Universe”, that of the Big Bang, “but may also have implications at the level of fundamental physics” that is used “in most various areas of knowledge.
Source: TSF
