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Darkish Matter Telescope Captures a Glowing Galaxy Merger
The Euclid Area Telescope is decking the halls with boughs of starlight
ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, picture processing: Euclid Science Floor Phase and M. Schirmer (MPIA) (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO)
A languid spiral galaxy seems draped towards deep area in a shocking new picture from the European Area Company’s Euclid telescope.
Euclid launched in 2023 on a six-year mission to map the cosmos at scale, observing billions of galaxies stretching as far-off as 10 billion light-years from Earth. The hassle might reveal how galaxies type and evolve and the way the universe has expanded over its 13.8-billion-or-so-year historical past.
In flip, astronomers hope Euclid will make clear darkish matter, which we all know tugs at regular matter however is totally invisible to us, and darkish vitality, the power that’s answerable for accelerating the pace at which the universe expands.
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That effort will start in earnest subsequent yr, when Euclid releases its first formal batch of information, which is able to account for about 14 p.c of its last survey space.
Till then, the Euclid staff has supplied the occasional teaser for the telescope’s energy, together with a festive new picture of the galaxy NGC 646. This elegant spiral galaxy, crammed with stars, is about 392 million light-years away from Earth—some 4 p.c of the space of Euclid’s farthest targets—and is retreating at greater than 5,000 miles per second.
Showing on the left tip of NGC 646 is a second galaxy, referred to as PGC 6014—however their obvious closeness is merely an optical phantasm; in fact, PGC 6014 is sort of 45 million light-years nearer to Earth.
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