Paris, France:
Europe's Euclid Space Telescope, which is on a mission to shed light on the mysteries of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, released its first data on Wednesday with a little help from volunteers and artificial intelligence.
The telescope was launched in 2023, with the aim of mapping one third of heaven – with 1.5 billion galaxies – to create what is invoiced as the most accurate 3D card of the Universe of Humanity.
Euclid, which now floats 1.5 million kilometers (932,0000 miles) from the earth, has previously released images of a series of strange galaxies, colorful Nebulas and radiant stars.
But the first release of astronomical data is 'a new milestone for our Dark Universe Detective', the science director Carole Munlell of the European Space Agency told a press conference.
The enormous amount of data that is accompanied by 27 scientific articles of the articles was still only less than 0.5 percent of heaven that Euclid will scan over his six-year mission.
Grasp the 'Cosmic Web'
Nevertheless, the early data already offer hints about the overall structure of the universe that is known as the “Cosmic Web”, said Project Scientist Valeria Pettorino.
Between large empty spaces there are huge clusters of galaxies connected by filaments of material that form this web, she explained.
This unimaginably massive structure can not only be explained by visible mat, so scientists believe that dark matter and dark energy should play a role.
It is thought that these invisible forces make up 95 percent of the universe, but still remain dressed in mystery.
It is believed that dark matter is the glue that keep galaxies together, while dark energy pulls them apart by growing the universe faster and faster over time.
Because looking at distant space, that also means looking back in time, Euclid scientists follow this cosmic struggle about most of the history of the universe – and hopefully to discover more about their true nature.
“Ultimately, we want to test the laws of gravity,” said Mundell.
Einstein's theory of relativity has passed on each test, “but in its current form it does not explain the accelerated expansion of the universe”, which is driven by dark energy, she explained.
However, the new data does not contain any major revelations about dark matter and dark energy. That will have to wait until closer to the end of Euclid's mission, the scientists said.
Galactic zoo
The Euclid Consortium, which brings together more than 2,000 researchers from Europe, the United States, Canada and Japan, has implemented the new data.
Wednesday's release contained 35 terabytes of data – the equivalent of streaming 4K video for 200 days – but only represented a week of Euclid's observation time.
This “enables us to see if the machines works,” the deputy scientific director Francis Bernardeau of the consortium told AFP.
The new data includes three parts of the air with 26 million galaxies.
The most distant was 10.5 billion light years removed, which is quite early in the history of 13.8 billion years of the universe.
The consortium then had to catalog all galaxies, quasars and other cosmic peculiarities through the telescope.
This includes what is known as gravitational lenses, that is when a solid object such as a Milky Way bends the light of something else huge and clear behind, creating a kind of magnifying glass.
In just a week, Euclid saw around 500 gravitational lenses, which is “much more than we expected,” said consortium member Mike Walmsley of the University of Toronto.
To help the data crack, the Euclid consortium used an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm and more than 10,000 sharp human volunteers.
The AI model selected possible gravity lenses from the data, which were then verified by people.
More civilian scientists then identified the forms of the galaxies, which in turn were used to train the AI algorithms to repeat this process, said Walmsley.
But this is all just “a taste of the things that are still coming,” Mundell added, with Euclid planning to release his first complete catalog of data next year.
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by Our staff and has been published from a syndicated feed.)
