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Euclid's First Images
- Jzush 3y agoWhat's up with all the purple dots, why are they all the same size?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- xioxox 3y agohttps://twitter.com/akira_doe/status/1721886699863834770 https://twitter.com/akira_doe/status/1721886699863834770
- SiempreViernes 3y agoAre you referring to what they describe as "ghosts" in the image description? > Another signature of Euclid special optics is the presence of a few, very faint and small round regions of a fuzzy blue colour. These are normal artefacts of complex optical systems, so-called ‘optical ghost’; easily identifiable during data analysis, they do not cause any problem for the science goals.
- Jzush 3y agoAh, yup those are the things I was referring to. They seems a little too uniform so it'd make sense that it'd be an optical artefact.
- pcrh 3y ago.... even the smallest dots are huge...
- zoeysmithe 3y agoI'll never be able to comprehend the idea of "Oh those many oblong glowing things in the background that are easy to miss? They're all galaxies of their own." The Perseus cluster contains thousands of galaxies. Every little thing in that photo is incomprehensibly large.
- Ringz 3y agoAnd what also makes me think again and again is the fact that we see their state from 240,000,000 years ago. Some of these huge little dots may no longer exist in the form now observed.
- dylan604 3y agoby the reverse of the incomprehensibly large realization is how incomprehensibly small we are. kind of humbling. of all of the petty animosity within human civilization, it doesn't mount to a hill of beans to the cosmos.
- mbivert 3y ago> Every little thing in that photo is incomprehensibly large. And that's just a small portion of what we can perceive, as humans. It's mindblowing; daily concerns are so trivial in comparison. It's so sad we can't see the night sky clearly anymore, that must have been fantastic, especially with an understanding of what those little specks of light are. Probably more fulfilling than watching screens.
- chrsw 3y agoMaybe we had to think our problems were important so we can surivive. I get your point though, we're due to revisit our priorities. Especailly as science continues to show us what's possible, and what's at stake. Turns out the universe is bigger than anyone imagined and we're probably not going to be visited by Little Green Men any time soon eager to tell us the meaning life, the universe and everything in between.
- superposeur 3y agoDo you know what advantage Euclid offers over Webb? Also, the Lagrange point is where Webb and some other stuff is located — is it getting crowded up there?
- _Microft 3y agoJWST is observing the infrared only and has a narrow field of view. Euclid is wide-angle with both visible and infrared capabilities.
- superposeur 3y agoThanks — is there a short answer to what can wide angle get you?
- mr_mitm 3y agoEuclid aims at measuring the shape of as many galaxies as possible to observe statistical effects that let us draw conclusions about the dark matter distribution
- anigbrowl 3y agoLiterally what it says - a wider field of vision. Read the text on the ESA page.
- giantrobot 3y agoA wide angle lets you image something like the Andromeda galaxy or nebula all at once in the same frame. A narrow angle is more "zoomed in" so to image a larger structure you'll need a lot of exposures and build a mosaic. It takes a lot longer which means you have to monopolize the instrument for a long time. If you want to image large structures like galaxy clusters a wide angle telescope is more efficient. Since the lifetimes of telescopes are limited (fuel, coolant, etc) you want to spend that time getting the most data out of the instruments.
- mr_mitm 3y ago
- aaroninsf 3y ago2/5 too many nearfield stars, would not travel through cosmos again
- twic 3y agoDamn the Solar System. Bad light; planets too distant; pestered with comets; feeble contrivance; could make a better myself. -- Francis Jeffery
- sergiotapia 3y agoAt this point there has to be other civilizations out there right? There's just too many systems for us to be the only ones.
- sheepscreek 3y agoEither that or as Elon once said, maybe life is just that special. I would still love for someone to do a Bayesian analysis of finding life on a planet/in a galaxy. It sounds pretty crazy when I say it out loud. We’re staring into infinity essentially. So yeah, life must be out there. But maybe “there” is very very far. Possibly many million light years away. In other words, in a universe with billions of galaxies containing billions of stars, life is likely not very plentiful. I imagine encountering any element besides H/He is usually a discovery (more so if the element is higher up in the periodic order, such as the ones needed for our kind of life). Then again, there is so much we don’t know. Like dark matter (anti-proton/electron/neutron/*). Maybe there is life that exists in anti-everything - (anti-carbon, etc). It won’t be very good if we ever encounter them (our carbon based bodies and anti-carbon based one will collapse on encounter, emanating a staggering amount of energy).
- ladams 3y agoA minor correction: anti-matter is actually regular matter. We understand it quite well, and are even able to create anti-atoms in the lab. On the other hand, dark matter is much more poorly understood: essentially the only evidence we have for its existence are observations of "weird" gravitational effects in the universe.
- hwayne 3y agoAlso we have pretty strong evidence that, at least in the observable part of the universe, almost all visible matter is regular matter.
- 8bitsrule 3y ago> maybe life is just that special. It appears from spectra that the chemical elements produced by stars are the same everywhere. If so, then the possibility of material life exists everywhere in the universe ... where conditions permit. It's down to the presence and concentrations of the various elements, the temperature and stability of some fluid medium that can bring the endless potential combinations into contact, and a lot of time. (Calculating the odds is an exercise left for the student.)
- h1fra 3y agoI started saying "this image is so noisy" but all the dots are actually stars, it's incredible!
- taylorlapeyre 3y agoThey aren't stars, they're galaxies!
- mr_mitm 3y agoDepends on which picture you're looking at
- adonovan 3y agoIt blew my mind when I realized that all but about a dozen of the points of light that you can see at night with the naked eye are actual stars... but nearly every point of light in the Hubble deep field is a galaxy of 10^8 stars.
- gwerbret 3y agoSince the article is low on details about Euclid [0]: > The objective of the Euclid mission is to better understand dark energy and dark matter by accurately measuring the accelerating expansion of the universe. > Euclid will [...] measure the redshift of galaxies out to a value of 2, which is equivalent to seeing back 10 billion years into the past. > During its nominal mission, which will last at least six years, Euclid will observe about 15,000 deg2 (4.6 sr), about a third of the sky, focusing on the extragalactic sky (the sky facing away from the Milky Way). > About 10 billion astronomical sources will be observed by Euclid, of which one billion will be used for weak lensing (to have their gravitational shear measured) with a precision 50 times more accurate than is possible today using ground-based telescopes. > After Russia withdrew in 2022 from the Soyuz-planned launch of Euclid, the ESA reassigned it to a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle, which launched on 1 July 2023. > In total, nine Science Data Centres spread over countries of the Euclid Consortium will process more than 170 petabytes of raw input images over at least 6 years > The telecommunications system is capable of transferring 850 gigabits per day. It uses the Ka band and CCSDS File Delivery Protocol to send scientific data at a rate of 55 megabits per second during the allocated period of 4 hours per day to the 35 m dish Cebreros ground station in Spain, when the telescope is above the horizon. Euclid has an onboard storage capacity of at least 300 GB. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_%28spacecraft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid_%28spacecraft
- Ringz 3y agoThanx!
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 3y ago> The telecommunications system is capable of transferring 850 gigabits per day. It uses the Ka band and CCSDS File Delivery Protocol to send scientific data at a rate of 55 megabits per second during the allocated period of 4 hours per day to the 35 m dish Cebreros ground station in Spain, when the telescope is above the horizon. To put this feat in perspective: it can be a pretty difficult job to install working WiFi in a warehouse a few hundred meters on a side. And the transfer rate at that distance is really mind boggling.
- nologic01 3y agoIs there some sort of citizen science we could engage-in with these datasets? When zooming in on Euclid’s view of the Perseus cluster of galaxies I see some very strange stuff :-)
- SushiHippie 3y agoDo you maybe mean this? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38177815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38177815
- _a_a_a_ 3y agogo on....
- dylan604 3y agoA popular citizen science is writing a classic hacker script with wget/curl to download all of the images and then stack them together. Numerous comets have been found this way as the comet will be the only thing moving once all of the images are aligned. I guess it doesn't have to be a comet, as asteroids and Planet X could be found this way as well. If the dot changes course/speed in your research, it could be Aliens!!!! The fun thing is that when a group gets scope time, it's typically for a specific purpose so the images are initially studied specifically for that purpose. It's possible there's more treasure in those images beyond the original intent that just needs more time being studied or added to other imagery/collections that come together to reveal something. So depending on what you might be interested in, you can find all of the images from every scope imaginable of the same object to do some fun stuff, or you could find a time series from one scope that might reveal something.
- semireg 3y ago"This figure shows an overlay of an image of the Moon on top of an image of the sky recorded simultaneously by the 36 detectors of Euclid’s VIS instrument." https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2023/11/Euclid_s_wide-eyed_look_at_the_cosmos https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2023/11/Euclid_s_w... Worth a click.
- twic 3y agoOh, so it's a Samsung?
- dylan604 3y agoI have a wide field telescope at home that yields a similar field of view when I image the moon. Too bad my scope doesn't have the same imaging abilities as this. I'm guessing a few more 0s and a couple additional commas added to the price tag helps.
- hn8305823 3y agoEuclid has a 1.2m primary mirror. For $600k you can have a 1m telescope in your backyard. You will still have to deal with the atmosphere, clouds, and Moon, however. Especially clouds. https://planewave.com/product/pw1000-1-meter-observatory-system/ https://planewave.com/product/pw1000-1-meter-observatory-sys...
- taway1237 3y ago>Astronomers demonstrated that galaxy clusters like Perseus can only have formed if dark matter is present in the Universe. Any MOND people here to comment what they think about Euclid? I always enjoy reading MOND speculation here on HN (even though I don't know enough to have an informed opinion myself).
- deanCommie 3y agoNot sure I'm understanding how to match the images here against Euclid's stated purpose "to investigate how dark matter and dark energy have made our Universe look like it does today." How is the data being presented here helping us investigate dark matter/energy, which is not in the data?
- mkesper 3y agoThese are first demonstration images. Euclid had a hard start but now it's ready to be used.
- venice_benice 3y agoEuclid's website has some nice explainers – for example, https://www.euclid-ec.org/public/core-science https://www.euclid-ec.org/public/core-science – which mentions using two methods: - “weak gravitational lensing” with the visible light instrument (which has higher resolution than the IR one) to measure very precisely the shapes of galaxies, to enable a statistical study of distortions in their shapes, caused by weak lensing due to dark matter (and regular matter which they can observe “directly”) - “galaxy clustering” with the near IR instrument to calculate distances to the galaxies (via their redshift) which they can use to map out 3D distribution of galaxies and compare to simulations for example (there is a nice figure on this page: https://www.euclid-ec.org/euclid-core-science https://www.euclid-ec.org/euclid-core-science showing a few surveys and simulations) There is more information on their blog here as well: https://www.euclid-ec.org/blog https://www.euclid-ec.org/blog The images here are simply first light images (i doubt the horsehead nebula or globular clusters are part of the core science of Euclid); more images and spectra will be taken in the coming years to do the actual core science (which will require a lot more data)
- thread_id 3y agoI never cease to be blown away by images of the Perseus cluster - planet earth is but a tiny spec in one solar system in an enormous spiral galaxy. In this single image there are scores of galaxies. “It’s hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said “billion” many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said “billions and billions.” For one thing, it’s too imprecise. How many billions are “billions and billions”? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? “Billions and billions” is pretty vague. When we reconfigured and updated the series, I checked—and sure enough, I never said it.” ― Carl Sagan, Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life & Death at the Brink of the Millennium
- ahazred8ta 3y agoThe running gag was "we'll travel through billions and billions of cubic kilometers of star-stuff".
- euroderf 3y agoPerhaps somebody misquoted him saying "billions of billions" ?