At present it’s as though the distance ladder observed by Hubble and Webb has firmly set an anchor point on one shoreline of a river, and the afterglow of the Big Bang observed by our Planck mission from the beginning of the Universe is set firmly on the other side. How the Universe’s expansion was changing in the billions of years between these two endpoints has yet to be directly observed.
📹 ESA – European Space Agency 📸 NASA, ESA, CSA, Space Telescope Science Inst., A. Riess (JHU/STScI)
ESA’s Euclid mission will create a 3D-map of the Universe that scientists will use to measure the properties of dark energy and dark matter and uncover the nature of these mysterious components. The map will contain a vast amount of data, it will cover more than a third of the sky and its third dimension will represent time spanning 10 billion years of cosmic history.
But dealing with the huge and detailed set of novel data that Euclid observations will produce is not an easy task. To prepare for this, scientists in the Euclid Consortium have developed one of the most accurate and comprehensive computer simulations of the large-scale structure of the Universe ever produced. They named this the Euclid Flagship simulation.
Running on large banks of advanced processors, computer simulations provide a unique laboratory to model the formation and evolution of large-scale structures in the Universe, such as galaxies, galaxy clusters, and the filamentary cosmic web they form. These state-of-the-art computational techniques allow astrophysicists to trace the motion and behavior of an extremely large number of dark-matter particles over cosmological volumes under the influence of their own gravitational pull. They replicate how and where galaxies form and grow, and are used to predict their distribution across the celestial sphere.
Explore the Euclid Flagship simulation in this video and get a sneak preview of the structure of the dark Universe, as we currently model it. New insights will be brought to you by the Euclid mission in the coming years.
Credits: ESA/Euclid Consortium/Cacao Cinema The authors kindly acknowledge the use of the Splotch package: http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/~kdolag/Splotch
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
ESA’s Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.
Euclid is a fully European mission, built and operated by ESA, with contributions from NASA. The Euclid Consortium – consisting of more than 2000 scientists from 300 institutes in 13 European countries, the US, Canada and Japan – provided the scientific instruments and scientific data analysis. ESA selected Thales Alenia Space as prime contractor for the construction of the satellite and its Service Module, with Airbus Defence and Space chosen to develop the Payload Module, including the telescope. NASA provided the near-infrared detectors of the NISP instrument.
More about Euclid: esa.int/euclid
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We are Europe’s gateway to space. Our mission is to shape the development of Europe’s space capability and ensure that investment in space continues to deliver benefits to the citizens of Europe and the world. Check out https://www.esa.int/ to get up to speed on everything space related.
