Euclid, the European mission to explore the unknown and dark universe, took off this Saturday from Cape Canaveral, Florida on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
The launch took place at 15:12 GMT, and after separation from the rocket, Euclid will set a point known as Lagrange 2, an average distance of 1.5 million kilometers from Earth – where telescopes such as Gaia and James Webb.
From there, for six years, he will observe billions of galaxies 10,000 million light-years away, covering more than a third of the sky; The goal is to create the largest and most accurate 3D catalog of the universe to improve knowledge of the nature of matter and dark energy.
This has never been addressed to the extent of this work, so one possibility is that the cosmological standard model works, but alternative equations may be a better fit.
Euclid, with a budget of 1,400 million euros (about 1,529 million dollars at the current exchange rate) and the participation of Spanish companies and research centers, is designed to provide new data on the unknown and dark side of the universe.
Through this three-dimensional map of the universe (time is the third dimension), information about the shapes, positions, and distances of galaxies can be gathered to help improve knowledge of how the expansion of the universe has changed, matter, and dark energy. Or in understanding gravity.
Ordinary matter represents 5% of planets, constellations or stars combined; The rest is dark energy (about 70% of the universe) and dark matter (25%), different components that cosmology is still trying to explain.
