Opinion Seeing through Euclid’s eye: The origins of the universe

The Horsehead Nebula looks like a wispy watercolour of a majestic sea horse rearing its head out of a swirling sea; the gleam of a thousand galaxies in the Perseus Cluster bursts out in pinpricks of light against a dark background, the montage made complete by a backdrop of more such glittering galaxies, all located light years away. These are only two of several spectacular, razor-sharp images captured by Euclid, a wide-angle telescope with a 600-megapixel camera, a near-infrared spectrometer, and a photometer, that was launched by the European Space Association (ESA) in July this year. Its purpose: To create a 3D map of the universe, the first of its kind.

The structure of galaxies, and by extension, of the universe, is dependent on the interplay of dark matter and dark energy. While the former is a major component of galaxies, the latter is the enigmatic driving force behind the universe’s accelerated expansion. NASA estimates dark energy at 68 per cent of the universe and dark matter at about 27 per cent. Like NASA’s James Webb Space telescope, ESA’s six-year Euclid mission, too, is geared to ferret into the mysteries of cosmic evolution, in particular into the expansion of the universe and the cohering forces that give it structure and form. The images are the first step towards creating a map of the origin story of the dark universe through observation of galaxies across a vast stretch of the sky.

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The mysteries of the cosmos have sparked human curiosity, driving research to unearth the secrets it has held close for light years. In recent years, the study of astronomy has made remarkable strides. Even then, decoding dark matter and dark energy — their composition and their magnetic hold over the working of the cosmos — has been one of the major challenges facing astronomers. What these images have given a glimpse of are the ways that the horizons of human endeavour can be expanded by darkness illuminated.