Live Reveal: Euclid Space Telescope’s First Glimpse of the Dark Universe

The European Space Agency’s $1.4 billion Euclid space telescope is charged with revealing the dark universe—the 95% of the cosmos we don’t see. On Tuesday, the telescope’s first images will be revealed live.

The image reveal will be broadcast live on ESA Web TV at 8:15 a.m. ET tomorrow. ESA will also have a YouTube livestream of the reveal which can be watched below. According to an ESA release, the image reveal will include five Euclid images of the universe, and high-resolution versions of the images will be accessible at this link.

Euclid’s main objective is to produce a 3D map of the universe through its observations, so scientists can better understand how the universe evolved from its emergence in the Big Bang, some 13.77 billion years ago. When you consider our solar system is only about 4.57 billion years old, and our species a mere 300,000 years old, it’s a testament to human ingenuity that we’ve figured out what we have to date. Euclid will advance our understanding further, clarifying how dark matter is distributed across the universe and dark energy’s role in the universe’s expansion.

A quick qualifier: Euclid’s first images were actually published on August 1, but those were test images taken during the process of commissioning the space observatory, which sits in a region of space about one million miles from Earth. The Webb Space Telescope, also at L2, similarly published the images taken as its cameras were being prepared for scientific observations months before the first suite of representative color images were unveiled last July.

Like Webb, Euclid will image the cosmos at near-infrared wavelengths. But unlike NASA’s $10 billion observatory, Euclid will also have a visible light camera (VIS). The telescope’s image quality will be four times sharper than sky surveys taken from the ground, according to ESA. You can read Gizmodo’s comprehensive look at the new space mission here.

The telescope’s VIS instrument will image billions of galaxies in its quest to produce the 3D map of the universe. A test image by the telescope’s Near-Infrared Camera and Spectrograph (NISP) instrument that showed just 4% of the telescope’s field of view was taken from a 100-second exposure; during Euclid’s regular operations, it collects light for about five times longer, revealing fainter and more distant light sources.

A couple of issues arose during Euclid’s commissioning process. In late September, the team announced the telescope was having trouble tracking some stars and that unwanted light was reaching the telescope’s detectors. But a software patch last month corrected some of those problems, and we’re now—finally—on the verge of seeing the observatory’s new images.

If you missed the where-to-watch information the first time, the reveal will be broadcast on ESA Web TV and YouTube at 8:15 a.m. ET tomorrow.

More: After Spooky Glitch, Euclid ‘Dark Universe’ Space Telescope Is Back on Course

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