The European Space Telescope Euclid will carry out Portugal’s planned 50,000 observations

The European Space Telescope Euclid will make about 50,000 observations of galaxies during its six-year mission, a task planned by the Institute for Astrophysics and Space Sciences (IA).

AI is leading Portuguese participation in a European Space Agency (ESA) mission that will launch on Saturday from the United States, if all goes according to plan, a telescope that will explore the dark and unknown side of the universe. .

For the first time, Portugal is featured prominently in the ESA space mission, 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 members of a consortium set up to develop, build and operate a space telescope.

Since then, more than 40 Portuguese researchers, as well as undergraduates and doctoral students, have worked on the mission.

António da Silva, AI researcher and professor at the Faculty of Science at the University of Lisbon (FCUL), is the Portuguese representative on the board of the Euclid Consortium.

To Lusa, the cosmologist explained the importance of the space mission by saying that “it was designed to answer simple scientific questions, but really puzzling ones with profound implications at the level of fundamental physics, cosmology and astrophysics.”

“Until today, we didn’t really know how galaxies are distributed in the universe or why they indicate that the universe is expanding at an accelerated 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 general theory of relativity correct? And what is dark matter? How does it relate to high-energy and particle physics models that seek to describe the universe shortly after the Big Bang? [teoria cosmológica sobre o desenvolvimento inicial do Universo]?” he listed.

Scientists estimate that almost the entire universe (95%) is made up of dark energy and matter, “unknown components in the light of modern physics,” according to the researcher.

To shed light on the dark universe, the Euclid telescope examines in detail, at a distance of 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, billions of galaxies, above which dark matter and energy generate effects that affect their structure, shape, distribution, movement and evolution.

The telescope will capture visible, but also invisible to the human eye, light from galaxies and clusters of galaxies, including the most distant ones, formed in a number of cases 10 billion years ago, when the Universe took “its first steps” (the Universe will be 13.8 billion years ago ).

The Institute of Astrophysics and Space Sciences was part of the team responsible for compiling the sky-tracking calendar, which included about 50,000 observations made by the telescope, determining which area of ​​the sky Euclid would observe at each moment of the mission.

Together, IA and FCUL have developed “software” that generates a time scale for the telescope’s orientation in space and observation times for a mission calendar that will run until 2030.

Following the launch of Euclid, the observing plan will be updated by the Sky Survey Operations Support Team led by both Portuguese institutions.

All updates will be regularly delivered to ESA so that mission control can point the telescope in the right direction for what it intends to observe in deep space.

The AI ​​also coordinates science teams that will use the data for purposes other than space missions, and is involved in coordinating research into theoretical physics, gravitational lensing, and galaxy clusters.

“A large number of galaxies and the resulting spectra will constitute a legacy, including the stellar population of nearby galaxies, morphology, masses, star formation rates and 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, able to unite the interests of the communities of cosmology, astrophysics and fundamental physics,” said António da Silva.

By making a three-dimensional map of the universe, the widest and most accurate ever made in time and space, covering more than a third of the sky and going back 10 billion years, the telescope “will allow us to characterize the dynamic properties of the dark components” of the universe and thereby pave the way for the development of “new models of elementary particle physics and high energies, which are included in the models of the 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 “could not only revolutionize understanding” of the “critical phase of the universe”, the Big Bang phase, “but could also have implications at the level of fundamental physics” that is used “in most different fields of knowledge”.