Euclid Telescope Images Encourage Astronomers to Explore the 'Dark Universe'

European astronomers on Tuesday, November 7, released the first images received from the Euclid space telescope. The Euclid mission is designed to better understand and uncover the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy—hidden forces believed to make up 95 percent of the universe. The European Space Agency, which is collaborating with NASA on this six-year mission, told Reuters that these images are the clearest of their kind and demonstrate the Euclid space telescope's ability to observe billions of galaxies up to a distance of 10 billion light-years from Earth. According to the European Space Agency, these images include four relatively close regions of the cosmos, including a thousand galaxies belonging to the 'Hercules Cluster,' which is only 240 million light-years away from us, and over a hundred thousand other scattered galaxies in the background. Scientists believe that vast and seemingly organized structures like the Hercules galaxy cluster could only have formed in the presence of dark matter. Corol Mandel, the scientific director of the European Space Agency, states that only 5 percent of the universe 'that we can see is understandable to us.' In an interview with Reuters, Ms. Mandel said, 'We call the rest of the universe dark because it does not produce light in the usual electromagnetic spectrum. But we know of its existence because we see its effects on visible matter.' She added that one of these effects of dark matter is bringing together some of the largest structures in the universe, such as galaxy clusters. Dark energy is even more mysterious than dark matter. Its hypothetical existence was only proven in the 1990s through the study of exploding stars known as 'supernovae.' Three American scientists shared the Nobel Prize in 2011 for this work. They concluded, with the help of some previous observations from the Hubble Space Telescope, that the universe is not only expanding but that its expansion rate is increasing—a stunning discovery attributed to what is called 'dark energy.' The Euclid space telescope, belonging to the European Space Agency, is named after the Greek mathematician Euclid. This telescope was launched into space on July 1, 2023, inside a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, USA. This $1.4 billion mission will last at least six years.