Euclid Telescope: First Images Revealed From 'Dark Universe' Mission (bbc.com) 10
AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: Europe's Euclid telescope is ready to begin its quest to understand the greatest mysteries in the Universe. Exquisite imagery from the space observatory shows its capabilities to be exceptional. Over the next six years, Euclid will survey a third of the heavens to get some clues about the nature of so-called dark matter and dark energy. The 1.4 billion euro Euclid telescope went into space in July. Since then, engineers have been fine-tuning it. There were some early worries. Initially, Euclid's optics couldn't lock on to stars to take a steady image. This required new software for the telescope's fine guidance sensor. Engineers also found some stray light was polluting pictures when the observatory was pointed in a certain way. But with these issues all now resolved, Euclid is good to go -- as evidenced by the release of five sample images on Tuesday. "No previous space telescope has been able to combine the breadth, depth and sharpness of vision that Euclid can," notes the BBC. "The astonishing James Webb telescope, for example, has much higher resolution, but it can't cover the amount of sky that Euclid does in one shot."
Sequence (Score:5, Informative)
1929 Edwin Hubble discovers the expansion of the universe.
1931 Einstein abandons the constant and calls it “my biggest blunder”.
1998 Astronomers measure the accelerated expansion of the universe implying a positive cosmological constant, possibly caused by the mysterious dark energy.
Re: (Score:2)
So what are we to gather?
Einstein was wrong about being wrong?
Re:Sequence (Score:5, Informative)
Einstein introduced the constant to make general relativity work in a static universe.
Then along comes Hubble and shows that the universe is expanding, so the constant was not necessary. It doesn't even lead to a static universe.
But now we need the constant again because the universe is not just expanding, but expanding at an accelerating rate.
Re: (Score:2)
> But now we need the constant again because the universe is not just expanding, but expanding at an accelerating rate.
Yeah, even though Bohm's configuration space wound up being mostly unnecessary, he was on to additional dimensions supporting spacetime.
It's funny because he also abandoned his good idea and then that German woman fixed his Relativity problem a few years later and someone fixed his determinism problem a few decades later and a brilliant lad at Sydney figured out how to avoid the complex
Sounds like a movie trailer. (Score:3)
IN A WORLD...
No, no.
IN A UNIVERSE...
Space is big (Score:5, Insightful)
I know this isn't the first space telescope, and the pictures aren't the first to show the expanse of space, but my goodness... The picture at the top of this article: https://www.mpia.de/news/2023-... [www.mpia.de] shows some "stars" (in the Perseus Cluster). Each "star" is actually a galaxy and there 1000 galaxies in the foreground, with... 100,000 more galaxies in the background. On average, a galaxy has 100 million stars in it, and spans hundreds of thousands of light years across.
To quote Douglas Adams, “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
He wasn't kidding.
Re:Space is big (Score:4, Interesting)
To quote Douglas Adams, “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
He wasn't kidding.
It’s funny because space is almost entirely empty at the same time, and yet critically dense because a black hole the size of the visible universe would have about the mass of the visible universe. Making that make sense breaks even the most robust minds.
Go Euclid! (Score:2)
Good luck Euclid (Score:2)
We really need to find some aliens-level anomaly, that would be fucking cool.