Friday, 30 June 2023
A Nottingham astronomer has received almost £1 million for research to use images from the Euclid satellite mission to search for orphaned stars in the densest regions of our Universe known as clusters of galaxies.
Professor Nina Hatch, an astronomer at the University of Nottingham has been awarded a Research Leadership Award by the Leverhulme Trust to use Euclid’s images in an unorthodox way to explore dark matter and dark energy.
The European Space Agency's flagship satellite mission, Euclid is due to launch from Cape Canaveral in Florida at 11:00 a.m. EDT (4:00 p.m. BST) on Saturday 1st July 2023, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
Euclid’s 6-year mission is to map over one-third of the sky to study dark matter and dark energy. To carry this out the Euclid satellite will take images as sharp as those from the Hubble Space Telescope but will observe more area of sky in one day than Hubble did in 25 years. After launch, Euclid will travel over 1 million miles into space away from the Sun, where the combined gravity of the Sun and Earth will cause it to orbit the Sun once a year, in step with the Earth. It will scan the sky and send many petabytes of data back to ESA’s ground stations.
Professor Hatch will lead a team of 6 researchers on this project.
Most stars live within the inner regions of galaxies, but some are stripped from their parent galaxy when galaxies get too close to one another. Once these ‘orphan’ stars are outside of galaxies, they are governed by the gravity of the dark matter. Just like fluorescent dyes are used to trace water flow in a sewer, or illuminate the brain’s structure in an MRI, we can use the orphan stars as a dye to trace the distribution of dark matter and learn about its nature.
Professor Hatch collaborates with more than 2000 scientists from across Europe, along with the European Space Agency and industrial teams, who have worked together to design and build Euclid, and are now getting ready to analyse the data from it. As well as aiming to answer some of science's most fundamental questions about the nature of the Universe, Euclid is set to revolutionise studies across all of astronomy, providing a legacy database for professional astronomers and the public to explore.
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More information is available from Professor Nina Hatch on Nina.Hatch@nottingham.ac.uk
Main image caption: A Hubble Space Telescope image of the galaxy cluster Abell 2744, nicknamed Pandora's Cluster. The starlight from the cluster has been artificially coloured blue. We can see faint starlight (darker blue) dispersed between the cluster galaxies (light blue). This faint light is produced by a trillion orphan stars that were stripped from cluster galaxies and now float freely between the galaxies.
Credits: NASA, ESA, M. Montes (IAC), and J. Lotz, M. Mountain, A. Koekemoer, and the HFF Team (STScI)
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