Europe's Euclid space telescope set for launch to explore 'dark universe'
A SpaceX rocket in Florida stood poised for launch on Saturday carrying an orbital telescope built to shed light on mysterious cosmic phenomena known as dark energy and dark matter, unseen forces scientists say account for 95% of the known universe. From there, Euclid is designed to explore the evolution of what astrophysicists refer to as the "dark universe," using a wide-angle telescope to survey galaxies as far away as 10 billion light years from Earth across an immense expanse of the sky beyond our own Milky Way galaxy. Dark matter and dark energy cannot be detected directly, but their properties "are encoded in the shapes and positions of the galaxies," said astrophysicist Jason Rhodes, lead scientist for Euclid at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory near Los Angeles. Observing subtle but distinct changes in the shapes and positions of galaxies over vast spans of time and space will reveal fine variations in cosmic acceleration, indirectly exposing the forces of dark energy, scientists say.
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