Aurora over Edinburgh, 2023-09, photo by Gordon Gibb

Space weather

Euclid is a space mission, for a very good reason: on the surface of Earth, “ground-based” telescopes are subject to sunlight during the day, varying temperatures, to clouds, humidity, wind, and sometimes even rain. They are subject to a constantly varying atmosphere – the consequences of ‘weather’. Euclid’s core science, cosmology, however, requires a telescope with very stable properties – not possible in ground-based weather – so Euclid had to go to space. In contrast, is the Sun-Earth-Lagrange-Point-2, where Euclid is now stationed, the most perfectly stable place? Well, not completely. We’ll tell you why.

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Measuring the Universe with Baryon Acoustic Oscillations

Hidden in the large-scale structure of the Universe – the so-called cosmic web, subtle waves provide a priceless view on the cosmos, helping scientists highlight some of the mysteries about its structure, evolution, and its current accelerated expansion governed by dark energy. This phenomenon is known as Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAOs). To understand what they are, we must travel back in time to the early Universe! Are you ready?

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Mapping the dark Universe with gravitational weak lensing

Gravitational lensing is a fascinating phenomenon that happens because of the way gravity works according to Einstein’s theory of General Relativity: mass curves spacetime. Imagine you have a massive object, like a star or a galaxy, sitting in space. This object has a strong gravitational pull, which means it will bend spacetime and – since light follows a path along this now bent space – it also bends the path of light that passes nearby.

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Why is going to space crucial to map dark matter?

A key promise of the Euclid mission is to explore the evolution of the dark Universe. The foundation of this ambitious program is a large optical and near-infrared imaging survey. Euclid’s cosmic map will depict more than one billion galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, making it the biggest and most detailed cosmological data set of our age. How does the quality of the first Euclid images compare to another reference cosmological data set, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Survey?

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