Scientists working with the Euclid Space Telescope have released their first treasure trove of data, showing distant galaxies in deep field images of stunning detail. The telescope from the European Space Agency (ESA), launched in July 2023, is designed to study dark matter, the most mysterious substance in the universe. It does this by taking images across a huge portion of the sky, tracking the movements of galaxies on a large scale — which gives clues to dark matter’s presence through its gravitational effects.
In this first data release, scientists have shared three mosaics covering hundreds of thousands of galaxies, showing their many different shapes and sizes.
“Euclid shows itself once again to be the ultimate discovery machine. It is surveying galaxies on the grandest scale, enabling us to explore our cosmic history and the invisible forces shaping our Universe,” said Carole Mundell, ESA’s Director of Science.
The data release includes three large mosaics called deep field images, which are just initial previews of what to expect from Euclid in the future. The deep fields were gathered during a week of observations and cover 26 million galaxies up to 10.5 billion light-years away, plus many other bright objects in the sky.
“It’s impressive how one observation of the deep field areas has already given us a wealth of data that can be used for a variety of purposes in astronomy: from galaxy shapes, to strong lenses, clusters, and star formation, among others,” said Valeria Pettorino, ESA’s Euclid project scientist. “We will observe each deep field between 30 and 52 times over Euclid’s six year mission, each time improving the resolution of how we see those areas, and the number of objects we manage to observe. Just think of the discoveries that await us.”
You can dive into the deep field images for yourself on ESA’s website, which hosts the Euclid Deep Field South mosaic, the Euclid Deep Field North mosaic, and the Euclid Deep Field Fornax mosaic.
With a projected mission aim to capture more than 1.5 billion galaxies over six years, and with the telescope generated around 100 GB of data per day, researchers will combine forces of human and AI capabilities to classify images of galaxies according to features like whether or not they have spiral arms.
A citizen science project called Galaxy Zoo has already seen nearly 10,000 human volunteers working to train an AI algorithm to categorize galaxies.
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.