'Dark universe detective' telescope releases first data
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 launched in 2023, aiming to chart one third of the sky — encompassing 1.5 billion galaxies — to create what has been billed as humanity's most accurate 3D map of the universe.
Euclid, which is now hovering 1.5 million kilometres from Earth, has previously released images of a range of strange galaxies, colourful nebulas and shining stars.
But the first release of astronomical data is "a new milestone for our dark universe detective," the European Space Agency's science director Carole Mundell told a press conference.
The huge amount of data — which was accompanied by 27 scientific papers — still only covers less then 0.5 per cent of the sky that Euclid will scan over its six-year mission.
Snagging the 'cosmic web'
Yet the early data already offers hints about the overall structure of the universe known as the "cosmic web," project scientist Valeria Pettorino said.
Between large empty spaces, there are massive clusters of galaxies connected by filaments of material which make up this web, she explained.
This unimaginably massive structure cannot be explained by visible matte alone, so scientists believe dark matter and dark energy must play a role.
These invisible forces are thought to make up 95 percent of the universe yet remain shrouded in mystery.
Dark matter is believed to be the glue that holds galaxies together, while dark energy pulls them apart by making the universe expand faster and faster over time.
Because looking into distant space also means looking back in time, Euclid allows scientists to track this cosmic tussle over most of the history of the universe — and hopefully discover more about their true nature.
"Ultimately, we want to test the laws of gravity," Mundell said.
Einstein's theory of relativity has passed every test thrown at it, "but it does not yet, in its current form, explain the accelerated expansion of the universe", which is driven by dark energy, she explained.
However the new data did 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.
Capturing the galactic zoo
The Euclid Consortium, which brings together more than 2,000 researchers from Europe, the United States, Canada and Japan, sorted through the new data.
Wednesday's release contained 35 terabytes of data — the equivalent of streaming 4K video for 200 days — yet represented just a week of Euclid's observation time.
This "allows to us see whether the machinery is working", the consortium's deputy scientific director Francis Bernardeau told AFP.
The new data covered three areas of the sky containing 26 million galaxies.
The most distant was 10.5 billion light years away, which is fairly early on in the 13.8 billion-year history of the universe.
The consortium then had to catalogue all the galaxies, quasars and other cosmic oddities captured by the telescope.
This includes what are known as gravitational lenses, which is when a massive object such as a galaxy bends the light of something else huge and bright behind it, creating a kind of magnifying glass.
In just a week, Euclid spotted around 500 gravitational lenses, which is "way more than we expected," said consortium member Mike Walmsley from the University of Toronto.
To help crunch the data, the Euclid consortium used an artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm as well as more than 10,000 keen-eyed human volunteers.
The AI model selected possible gravitational lenses from the data, which were then verified by humans.
More citizens scientists then identified the shapes of the galaxies, which was in turn used to train the AI algorithms to repeat this process, Walmsley said.
But this is all just "a taste of things to come", Mundell added, with Euclid planned to release its first full catalogue of data next year.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Al Etihad
3 days ago
- Al Etihad
Solar Orbiter spacecraft obtains first images of the sun's poles
11 June 2025 18:13 (REUTERS)The robotic Solar Orbiter spacecraft has obtained the first images ever taken of our sun's two poles as scientists seek a deeper understanding of Earth's host star, including its magnetic field, its 11-year cycle of activity and the solar European Space Agency on Wednesday released images taken in March using three of Solar Orbiter's onboard instruments. They show the sun's south pole from a distance of roughly 40 million miles (65 million km), obtained at a period of maximum solar activity. Images of the north pole are still being transmitted by the spacecraft back to Orbiter, developed by ESA in collaboration with the U.S. space agency NASA, was launched in 2020 from now, all the views of the sun have come from the same vantage point - looking face-on toward its equator from the plane on which Earth and most of the solar system's other planets orbit, called the ecliptic Orbiter used a slingshot flyby around Venus in February to get out of this plane to view the sun from up to 17 degrees below the solar equator. Future slingshot flybys will provide an even better view, at beyond 30 degrees."The best is still to come. What we have seen is just a first quick peek," said solar physicist Sami Solanki of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, who heads the scientific team for the spacecraft's Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager instrument."The spacecraft observed both poles, first the south pole, then the north pole," Solanki said. "The north pole's data will arrive in the coming weeks or months."Solar Orbiter is gathering data on phenomena including the sun's magnetic field, its activity cycle, and the solar wind, a relentless high-speed flow of charged particles emanating from the sun's outermost atmospheric layer that fills interplanetary space."We are not sure what we will find, and it is likely we will see things that we didn't know about before," said solar physicist Hamish Reid of University College London's Mullard Space Science Laboratory, UK co-principal investigator of Solar Orbiter's Extreme Ultraviolet Imager sun is a ball of hot electrically charged gas that, as it moves, generates a powerful magnetic field, which flips from south to north and back again every 11 years in what is called the solar magnetic field drives the formation of sunspots, cooler regions on the solar surface that appear as dark blotches. At the cycle's beginning, the sun has fewer sunspots. Their number increases as the cycle progresses, before starting all over again."What we have been missing to really understand this (solar cycle) is what is actually happening at the top and bottom of the sun," Reid sun's diameter is about 865,000 miles (1.4 million km), more than 100 times wider than Earth."Whilst the Earth has a clear north and south pole, the Solar Orbiter measurements show both north and south polarity magnetic fields are currently present at the south pole of the sun. This happens during the maximum in activity of the solar cycle, when the sun's magnetic field is about to flip. In the coming years, the sun will reach solar minimum, and we expect to see a more orderly magnetic field around the poles of the sun," Reid said."We see in the images and movies of the polar regions that the sun's magnetic field is chaotic at the poles at the (current) phase of the solar cycle - high solar activity, cycle maximum," Solanki sun is located about 93 million miles (149 million km) from our planet."The data that Solar Orbiter obtains during the coming years will help modelers in predicting the solar cycle. This is important for us on Earth because the sun's activity causes solar flares and coronal mass ejections which can result in radio communication blackouts, destabilise our power grids, but also drive the sensational auroras," Reid said."Solar Orbiter's new vantage point out of the ecliptic will also allow us to get a better picture of how the solar wind expands to form the heliosphere, a vast bubble around the sun and its planets," Reid added.A previous spacecraft, Ulysses, flew over the solar poles in the 1990s. "Ulysses, however, was blind in the sense that it did not carry any optical instruments - telescopes or cameras - and hence could only sense the solar wind passing the spacecraft directly, but could not image the sun," Solanki said.
Al Etihad
4 days ago
- Al Etihad
Greenland ice melted much faster than average in May heatwave: Scientists
11 June 2025 08:23 COPENHAGEN (AFP) Greenland's ice sheet melted 17 times faster than its average rate during a May heatwave that also affected Iceland, according to a report released by the scientific network World Weather Attribution (WWA) on Arctic region is on the frontline of global warming, heating up four times faster than the rest of the planet since 1979, according to a 2022 study in the scientific journal Nature."The melting rate of the Greenland ice sheet by, from a preliminary analysis, a factor of 17... means the Greenland ice sheet contribution to sea level rise is higher than it would have otherwise been without this heat wave," one of the authors of the report, Friederike Otto, associate professor in climate science at the Imperial College London, told reporters."Without climate change, this would have been impossible," she Iceland, the temperature exceeded 26 degrees Celsius on May 15, an unprecedented occurrence for that time of year on the subarctic island. "Temperatures over Iceland as observed this May are record-breaking, more than 13 degrees Celsius hotter than the 1991-2020 average May daily maximum temperatures," the WWA May, 94 per cent of Iceland's weather stations registered record temperatures, according to the country's meteorological eastern Greenland, the hottest day during the heatwave was about 3.9 degrees Celsius warmer compared to the preindustrial climate, the WWA said."While a heatwave that is around 20 degrees Celsius might not sound like an extreme event from the experience of most people around the world, it is a really big deal for this part of the world," Otto said."It affects the whole world massively," she to the WWA, the record highs observed in Iceland and Greenland this May could reoccur every 100 Greenland's indigenous communities, the warmer temperatures and melting ice affect their ability to hunt on the ice, posing a threat to their livelihood and traditional way of changes also affect infrastructure in the two countries. "In Greenland and Iceland, infrastructure is built for cold weather, meaning during a heatwave ice melt can lead to flooding and damage roads and infrastructure," the WWA said.
Al Etihad
4 days ago
- Al Etihad
Emperor penguin populations declining faster than expected, say scientists
10 June 2025 15:36 PARIS (AFP) Emperor penguin populations in Antarctica have shrunk by almost a quarter as global warming transforms their icy habitat, according to new research on Tuesday that warned the losses were far worse than previously imagined. Scientists monitoring the world's largest penguin species used satellites to assess sixteen colonies in the Antarctic Peninsula, Weddell Sea and Bellingshausen Sea, representing nearly a third of the global emperor penguin population. What they found was "probably about 50-per cent worse" than even the most pessimistic estimate of current populations using computer modelling, said Peter Fretwell, who tracks wildlife from space at the British Antarctic Survey (BAS).Researchers know that climate change is driving the losses, but the speed of the declines is a particular cause for alarm. The study, published in the journal Nature Communications: Earth & Environment, found that numbers declined 22 per cent in the 15 years to 2024 for the colonies monitored. This compares with an earlier estimate of a 9.5-percent reduction across Antarctica as a whole between 2009 and is thinning and destabilising the ice under the penguins' feet in their breeding grounds. In recent years some colonies have lost all their chicks because the ice has given way beneath them, plunging hatchlings into the sea before they were old enough to cope with the freezing said the new research suggests penguin numbers have been declining since the monitoring began in was even before global warming was having a major impact on the sea ice, which forms over open water adjacent to land in the region. But he said the culprit is still likely to be climate change, with warming driving other challenges for the penguins, such as higher rainfall or increasing encroachment from predators. "Emperor penguins are probably the most clear-cut example of where climate change is showing its effect," Fretwell told AFP. "There's no fishing. There's no habitat destruction. There's no pollution which is causing their populations to decline. "It's just the temperatures in the ice on which they breed and live, and that's climate change." 'Worrying Result' Emperor penguins, aka Aptenodytes forsteri, number about a quarter of a million breeding pairs, all in Antarctica, according to a 2020 study. A baby emperor penguin emerges from an egg kept warm in winter by a male, while the female in a breeding pair embarks on a two-month fishing expedition. When she returns to the colony, she feeds the hatchling by regurgitating and then both parents take turns to forage. To survive on their own, chicks must develop waterproof feathers, a process that typically starts in new research uses high-resolution satellite imagery during the months of October and November before the region is plunged into winter darkness. Fretwell said future research could use other types of satellite monitoring, like radar or thermal imaging, to capture populations in the darker months, as well as expand to the other colonies.
