The European Space Agency (ESA) announced yesterday that it will launch a spacecraft in 2020 to search for dark matter and dark energy, two mysterious entities that make up the universe.
The ESA Scientific Program Committee has just approved the Euclidean launch project for dark matter and dark energy research. “We have just taken one more step to discover more of the secrets of the universe,” René Laureijs, a scientist from the Euclid project, told AFP.
ESA’s spacecraft will use a 1.2m-diameter telescope and a special camera to map 1/3 three-dimensionally across the known universe, including up to two billion galaxies and objects.
“Euclid’s goal is to answer the most important question in modern astronomy: why is the universe expanding at an increasing rate, not slowly?” ESA said.
Dark matter and dark energy are hypothetical entities in the universe. They don’t emit or reflect enough radiation that today’s telescopes or devices can detect. The scientific world recognizes dark matter by its effect on other entities. Based on current knowledge, scientists predict that dark matter makes up 70% of the matter in the universe.
It is argued that dark energy causes the universe to expand at an increasing rate, while dark matter binds cosmic entities together through gravity.
