Esa - Euclid: Exploring the dark matter

At ESA's ESTEC center near Amsterdam and at CERN in Geneva scientists are trying to explore 'The Dark Side', the mysterious forces of dark matter and dark energy which are thought to rule the cosmos. Euclid space telescope will soon offer from Space a unique point of view while on the ground, looking at the atom level, the particles accelerator can offer new observations At the beginning of the past century, Albert Einstein was the first to hypothesize that empty space in the universe was not really empty. A hundred years later, the nature of that empty space is still unknown, but thanks to the results of the Planck space observatory mission, scientists have concurred on the existence of a dark matter. They calculate that ordinary, visible matter accounts for about 5 percent of our universe. The rest is dark matter and a repulsive force called dark energy, which is accelerating the universe’s expansion. Although we don't know much about both dark matter and dark energy, this could change quite soon. ESA is now building a new space telescope called Euclid which will further look at the hidden side of the universe. René Laureijs, Euclid Project Scientist, ESA (EN) "I'm working on Euclid, that is a mission to map the universe and to explore the universe tosee dark energy and also to see the dark matter content of the universe. For that we build a highly precise telescope". Euclid will use a 1.2-m diameter telescope to track the evolution of the Universe’s structure over three-quarters of its history. It will do so by taking hundreds of thousands of sharp images. René Laureijs, Euclid Project Scientist, ESA (EN) "When we look at the sky and take a picture, we stop everything, we stop the reaction wheels, and the only way to correct for possible drifts of the satellite is doing it with cold gas, because cold gas gives no disturbances to the images, the sharp image we want to achieve". While Euclid will look at the vastness of the Universe, what will revolutionize our understanding is to couple Euclid results with the study of the minuscule world deep within atoms. In Geneva, the CERN is about to restart the world's foremost particle accelerator, LHC, the Large Hadron Collider. Three years ago it spotted the Higgs Boson. Luca Malgeri, Physics coordinator for CMS experiment, CERN (EN) "We hope that as soon as the machine is switched on, we might have discovery even in the first days, if not in the first weeks". The LHC has been upgraded, is more powerful, and is going to work at full power for the first time. It is hoped that it will open the door for the identification of dark matter. Luca Malgeri, Physics coordinator for CMS experiment, CERN (EN) "We know the questions, we have many questions to answer, and we are pretty sure that the LHC can answer some of them. We hope that it could answer all of them....it is not clear". Euclid and LHC new missions are optimized to understand why the Universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, rather than slowing down due to the gravitational attraction of all the matter in it. René Laureijs, Euclid Project Scientist, ESA (EN) "The interesting thing is that we get more and more dark energy. Why? Because our universe is expanding, and with our expanding universe, we get more dark energy in our universe. Now the ordinary matter, so dark matter and normal matter, is not expanding, it’s diluting. So the fraction of dark energy compared to normal matter is increasing in time. When the universe expands more and more we get more volume of our universe, we get more space, and we get more dark energy". Scientists in space or on the ground are ready to step into the unknown – an unknown that is crucial to understand the future of the universe. René Laureijs, Euclid Project Scientist, ESA: "I'm working on Euclid, that is a mission to map the universe and to explore the universe to see dark energy and also to see the dark matter content of the universe. For that we build a highly precise telescope in which we can map dark matter structures as well as derived properties of the dark energy". Luca Malgeri, Physics coordinator for CMS experiment, CERN: "The dark matter we know it exists, it is dark, in the sense that we don't know anything else about it, apart from the fact that it is creating some gravitational effect". Luca Malgeri, Physics coordinator for CMS experiment, CERN: "There are many many theories, but none of these theories has been proven, and the LHC can be one of the machines that proves one of these theories".

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