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Euclid 'dark universe' telescope reveals its 1st sparkling images of the cosmos (photos) – Space.com

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On Monday (July 31), the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope sent its first images back to Earth. And while these seminal portraits are certainly mesmerizing, they also confirm that the space observatory’s instruments are working in tip-top shape. 

Euclid’s success so far is really exciting because, to put it simply, this machine’s purpose is to map out the dark side of our universe by analyzing billions of galaxies that reside up to about 10 billion light-years away. Better yet, the agency also says this ambitious map will be in “3D,” because it’ll include the element of time to show how those realms evolved in tandem with a maturing cosmos.

“The outstanding first images obtained using Euclid’s visible and near-infrared instruments open a new era to observational cosmology and statistical astronomy,” Yannick Mellier, astronomer at the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris and Euclid Consortium lead, said in a statement. “They mark the beginning of the quest for the very nature of dark energy.”

Euclid launched on July 1 from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Now floating about a million miles (1.6 million km) from Earth, it joined the James Webb Space Telescope on July 28 at what’s known as the second Lagrange point. Over the next few months, scientists will continue testing the machine until it starts officially developing its epic cosmic survey. 

Related: Euclid mission: ESA’s hunt for dark matter and dark energy

We’ll get more into what a dark-universe-hunting machine means in a bit, but first, let’s discuss Euclid’s stunning, star-filled images. 

This image was taken during commissioning of Euclid to check that the focused VIS instrument worked as expected. Because it is largely unprocessed, some unwanted artefacts remain. For example you can see some cosmic rays that shoot straight across. (Image credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA)

The images you see above were taken with an instrument on Euclid called VIS, which stands for “Visible Instrument.” As its name suggests, VIS captures the universe through the part of the electromagnetic spectrum that’s visible to human eyes, wavelengths between 550 and 900 nanometers.

On the left, you can see VIS’ full field of view — and on the right, a zoomed-in version. ESA likens the range of the close-up to about one quarter the width and height of the full moon as seen from Earth.

Some highlights of VIS’ portraits include cosmic rays shooting straight across the field, a wealth of unmissable glittering stars, and most importantly, a few fuzzy blobs. Those blobs, ESA explains, are galaxies Euclid will investigate further while developing a highly detailed map of our universe, dark energy and all. 

“Ground-based tests do not give you images of galaxies or stellar clusters, but here they all are in this one field,” Reiko Nakajima, VIS instrument scientist, said in the statement. “It is beautiful to look at, and a joy to do so with the people we’ve worked together with for so long.”

Next, we get to NISP, which stands for Euclid’s Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer. As ESA puts it, NISP has two roles. First, it can image galaxies in infrared light, or light invisible to human eyes that falls between about 950 and 2020 nanometers on the electromagnetic spectrum. The James Webb Space Telescope also taps into such infrared wavelengths, which is why scientists often say it’s unveiling an invisible universe. It quite literally is.

Second, NISP can measure precisely how much light each galaxy emits — this latter bit can tell us how far away those galaxies are.

Euclid’s telescope collected light for 100 seconds to enable NISP to create this image. During nominal operation, it is expected to collect light for roughly five times longer, unveiling many more distant galaxies. (Image credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA)

The NISP images you see above are pretty similar to the VIS set in that the left side includes NISP’s full field while the right shows a zoomed-in section. 

But before reaching the NISP detector, deep space light captured by Euclid also passes through some cool filters. And that offers some pretty awesome results. These filters can do things like measure brightness at a specific infrared wavelength, which helps with NISP’s galactic distance measurements. 

“Although these first test images are not yet usable for scientific purposes, I am pleased that the telescope and the two instruments are now working superbly in space,” Knud Jahnke, from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) in Heidelberg who works on Euclid’s NISP instrument, said in a statement.

And in fact, one of these filters is why NISP offered us a third test image.

A NISP image taken by Euclid with the grism filter. (Image credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA)

Besides looking like an early 2000’s computer screensaver, this image is important because each streak represents an individual light spectrum of a galaxy or star. Euclid has a device known as a “grism” that can basically split cosmic light into a full spectrum of wavelengths before sending the data to NISP. 

With this process, scientists can determine how far away a certain galaxy is, for instance, as well as what the galaxy is chemically made of. 

“We’ve seen simulated images, we’ve seen laboratory test images,” William Gillard, NISP instrument scientist, said in the statement. “It’s still hard for me to grasp these images are now the real universe. So detailed, just amazing.”

Now, if you’ve still been stuck on the fact Euclid can help us understand the dark universe, here’s what that means.

What’s next for Euclid?

Dark energy and its partner-in-crime, dark matter, constitute some of the biggest and most fascinating questions to exist in astronomy today. Neither phenomena can be seen by human eyes, yet still appear to be holding our universe together. 

For starters, space is constantly expanding outward in every direction like an unpoppable balloon. But the weird thing is, this ballooning seems to be happening at speeds scientists can’t quite account for with all the visible stuff in our universe. Thus, something else must be acting to accelerate the cosmic expansion. Scientists call that “something” dark energy.

Meanwhile, within the expanding universe, there seems to be some sort of glue making sure galaxies are held in place and dictating the way they’re arranged. For example, scientists calculate that intergalactic gas and stars often move around as though there’s extra gravity pulling on them. Presumably, this is because some sort of invisible material surrounds the galaxies these objects live in (perhaps like a halo) and therefore exerts gravitational forces on them. That unseeable “glue” is known as dark matter.

Dark matter and dark energy aren’t necessarily made up of one, or even two, things. They could be made up of a bunch of different components. Scientists just use these as bulk terms to describe gaps in our understanding. 

All we know for sure, right now, is that the dark universe exists. 

But if Euclid’s mission of exquisitely mapping the universe over the next six years or so pans out, perhaps scientists will gain some clues as to what the dark universe truly is. 

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This is because, as dark matter and energy interact with things in space, laying out the distribution and evolution of those things can tell us where the dark universe fits into the story.

“I have full confidence that the team behind the mission will succeed in using Euclid to reveal so much about the 95% of the universe that we currently know so little about,” ESA director, General Josef Aschbacher, said in the statement.

“After more than 11 years of designing and developing Euclid, it’s exhilarating and enormously emotional to see these first images,” Euclid project manager, Giuseppe Racca, said in the statement. “It’s even more incredible when we think that we see just a few galaxies here, produced with minimum system tuning. The fully calibrated Euclid will ultimately observe billions of galaxies to create the biggest-ever 3D map of the sky.”

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Here’s how Helene and other storms dumped a whopping 40 trillion gallons of rain on the South

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More than 40 trillion gallons of rain drenched the Southeast United States in the last week from Hurricane Helene and a run-of-the-mill rainstorm that sloshed in ahead of it — an unheard of amount of water that has stunned experts.

That’s enough to fill the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium 51,000 times, or Lake Tahoe just once. If it was concentrated just on the state of North Carolina that much water would be 3.5 feet deep (more than 1 meter). It’s enough to fill more than 60 million Olympic-size swimming pools.

“That’s an astronomical amount of precipitation,” said Ed Clark, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Water Center in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. “I have not seen something in my 25 years of working at the weather service that is this geographically large of an extent and the sheer volume of water that fell from the sky.”

The flood damage from the rain is apocalyptic, meteorologists said. More than 100 people are dead, according to officials.

Private meteorologist Ryan Maue, a former NOAA chief scientist, calculated the amount of rain, using precipitation measurements made in 2.5-mile-by-2.5 mile grids as measured by satellites and ground observations. He came up with 40 trillion gallons through Sunday for the eastern United States, with 20 trillion gallons of that hitting just Georgia, Tennessee, the Carolinas and Florida from Hurricane Helene.

Clark did the calculations independently and said the 40 trillion gallon figure (151 trillion liters) is about right and, if anything, conservative. Maue said maybe 1 to 2 trillion more gallons of rain had fallen, much if it in Virginia, since his calculations.

Clark, who spends much of his work on issues of shrinking western water supplies, said to put the amount of rain in perspective, it’s more than twice the combined amount of water stored by two key Colorado River basin reservoirs: Lake Powell and Lake Mead.

Several meteorologists said this was a combination of two, maybe three storm systems. Before Helene struck, rain had fallen heavily for days because a low pressure system had “cut off” from the jet stream — which moves weather systems along west to east — and stalled over the Southeast. That funneled plenty of warm water from the Gulf of Mexico. And a storm that fell just short of named status parked along North Carolina’s Atlantic coast, dumping as much as 20 inches of rain, said North Carolina state climatologist Kathie Dello.

Then add Helene, one of the largest storms in the last couple decades and one that held plenty of rain because it was young and moved fast before it hit the Appalachians, said University of Albany hurricane expert Kristen Corbosiero.

“It was not just a perfect storm, but it was a combination of multiple storms that that led to the enormous amount of rain,” Maue said. “That collected at high elevation, we’re talking 3,000 to 6000 feet. And when you drop trillions of gallons on a mountain, that has to go down.”

The fact that these storms hit the mountains made everything worse, and not just because of runoff. The interaction between the mountains and the storm systems wrings more moisture out of the air, Clark, Maue and Corbosiero said.

North Carolina weather officials said their top measurement total was 31.33 inches in the tiny town of Busick. Mount Mitchell also got more than 2 feet of rainfall.

Before 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, “I said to our colleagues, you know, I never thought in my career that we would measure rainfall in feet,” Clark said. “And after Harvey, Florence, the more isolated events in eastern Kentucky, portions of South Dakota. We’re seeing events year in and year out where we are measuring rainfall in feet.”

Storms are getting wetter as the climate change s, said Corbosiero and Dello. A basic law of physics says the air holds nearly 4% more moisture for every degree Fahrenheit warmer (7% for every degree Celsius) and the world has warmed more than 2 degrees (1.2 degrees Celsius) since pre-industrial times.

Corbosiero said meteorologists are vigorously debating how much of Helene is due to worsening climate change and how much is random.

For Dello, the “fingerprints of climate change” were clear.

“We’ve seen tropical storm impacts in western North Carolina. But these storms are wetter and these storms are warmer. And there would have been a time when a tropical storm would have been heading toward North Carolina and would have caused some rain and some damage, but not apocalyptic destruction. ”

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Follow AP’s climate coverage at https://apnews.com/hub/climate

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter at @borenbears

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Associated Press climate and environmental coverage receives support from several private foundations. See more about AP’s climate initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

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‘Big Sam’: Paleontologists unearth giant skull of Pachyrhinosaurus in Alberta

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It’s a dinosaur that roamed Alberta’s badlands more than 70 million years ago, sporting a big, bumpy, bony head the size of a baby elephant.

On Wednesday, paleontologists near Grande Prairie pulled its 272-kilogram skull from the ground.

They call it “Big Sam.”

The adult Pachyrhinosaurus is the second plant-eating dinosaur to be unearthed from a dense bonebed belonging to a herd that died together on the edge of a valley that now sits 450 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

It didn’t die alone.

“We have hundreds of juvenile bones in the bonebed, so we know that there are many babies and some adults among all of the big adults,” Emily Bamforth, a paleontologist with the nearby Philip J. Currie Dinosaur Museum, said in an interview on the way to the dig site.

She described the horned Pachyrhinosaurus as “the smaller, older cousin of the triceratops.”

“This species of dinosaur is endemic to the Grand Prairie area, so it’s found here and nowhere else in the world. They are … kind of about the size of an Indian elephant and a rhino,” she added.

The head alone, she said, is about the size of a baby elephant.

The discovery was a long time coming.

The bonebed was first discovered by a high school teacher out for a walk about 50 years ago. It took the teacher a decade to get anyone from southern Alberta to come to take a look.

“At the time, sort of in the ’70s and ’80s, paleontology in northern Alberta was virtually unknown,” said Bamforth.

When paleontogists eventually got to the site, Bamforth said, they learned “it’s actually one of the densest dinosaur bonebeds in North America.”

“It contains about 100 to 300 bones per square metre,” she said.

Paleontologists have been at the site sporadically ever since, combing through bones belonging to turtles, dinosaurs and lizards. Sixteen years ago, they discovered a large skull of an approximately 30-year-old Pachyrhinosaurus, which is now at the museum.

About a year ago, they found the second adult: Big Sam.

Bamforth said both dinosaurs are believed to have been the elders in the herd.

“Their distinguishing feature is that, instead of having a horn on their nose like a triceratops, they had this big, bony bump called a boss. And they have big, bony bumps over their eyes as well,” she said.

“It makes them look a little strange. It’s the one dinosaur that if you find it, it’s the only possible thing it can be.”

The genders of the two adults are unknown.

Bamforth said the extraction was difficult because Big Sam was intertwined in a cluster of about 300 other bones.

The skull was found upside down, “as if the animal was lying on its back,” but was well preserved, she said.

She said the excavation process involved putting plaster on the skull and wooden planks around if for stability. From there, it was lifted out — very carefully — with a crane, and was to be shipped on a trolley to the museum for study.

“I have extracted skulls in the past. This is probably the biggest one I’ve ever done though,” said Bamforth.

“It’s pretty exciting.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 25, 2024.

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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The ancient jar smashed by a 4-year-old is back on display at an Israeli museum after repair

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TEL AVIV, Israel (AP) — A rare Bronze-Era jar accidentally smashed by a 4-year-old visiting a museum was back on display Wednesday after restoration experts were able to carefully piece the artifact back together.

Last month, a family from northern Israel was visiting the museum when their youngest son tipped over the jar, which smashed into pieces.

Alex Geller, the boy’s father, said his son — the youngest of three — is exceptionally curious, and that the moment he heard the crash, “please let that not be my child” was the first thought that raced through his head.

The jar has been on display at the Hecht Museum in Haifa for 35 years. It was one of the only containers of its size and from that period still complete when it was discovered.

The Bronze Age jar is one of many artifacts exhibited out in the open, part of the Hecht Museum’s vision of letting visitors explore history without glass barriers, said Inbal Rivlin, the director of the museum, which is associated with Haifa University in northern Israel.

It was likely used to hold wine or oil, and dates back to between 2200 and 1500 B.C.

Rivlin and the museum decided to turn the moment, which captured international attention, into a teaching moment, inviting the Geller family back for a special visit and hands-on activity to illustrate the restoration process.

Rivlin added that the incident provided a welcome distraction from the ongoing war in Gaza. “Well, he’s just a kid. So I think that somehow it touches the heart of the people in Israel and around the world,“ said Rivlin.

Roee Shafir, a restoration expert at the museum, said the repairs would be fairly simple, as the pieces were from a single, complete jar. Archaeologists often face the more daunting task of sifting through piles of shards from multiple objects and trying to piece them together.

Experts used 3D technology, hi-resolution videos, and special glue to painstakingly reconstruct the large jar.

Less than two weeks after it broke, the jar went back on display at the museum. The gluing process left small hairline cracks, and a few pieces are missing, but the jar’s impressive size remains.

The only noticeable difference in the exhibit was a new sign reading “please don’t touch.”

The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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