Dark matter mystery closer to being solved thanks to new Euclid telescope images

Euclid's new image of star-forming region Messier 78 – 1,300 light-years away – offers hints as to what exactly dark matter is - PA/ESA

The dark matter-hunting telescope Euclid has sent back new images which hint at the origins of one of the most mysterious forces in the universe.

For the first time, scientists have pulled back the curtain on the Messier 78 nebula, a region where stars are forming which is usually shrouded by dense clouds of dust and gas, and impossible to penetrate.

The near-infrared camera on Euclid has allowed scientists to peer inside, where they have spotted brown dwarfs and rogue planets, both of which are candidates for “dark matter”.

Although nobody knows what dark matter is, it is believed to make up about 85 per cent of the Universe’s mass, keeping stars and planets in their galaxies.

It cannot be seen but its impact can be viewed through telescopes because it bends light around galaxies, creating a ring of star light known as gravitational lensing.

Brown dwarfs are halfway between massive planets and stars and emit radiation but have not burst into being full stars. Rogue planets are planets around four times the mass of Jupiter, but are not orbiting a star.

If brown dwarfs and rogue planets are responsible for dark matter there would need to be far more than have currently been spotted, but with Euclid, scientists are now able to look into nebulae to see if there are enough.

Jerry Zhang, of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, said: “Dark matter, as we all know, is so mysterious, and it’s invisible. But so far, brown dwarfs and planetary-mass objects are actually candidates for this missing mass.

“However, the individual object has so little mass that we have to find a significant number of them to support this idea. We still believe that we only found the tip of the iceberg.”

The £1.2 billion Euclid space telescope, which includes a camera developed by University College London, is studying the impact of dark matter and dark energy on 1.5 billion galaxies – more than one third of the visible sky, and probe 70 per cent of cosmic time.

Led by the European Space Agency (ESA) the telescope’s enormous field of vision is 250 times larger than the Hubble Space Telescope and creates more data in one day than Hubble has ever produced.

Just five per cent of the universe is visible. The rest is made up of strange unknowns whose presence can only be inferred by their influence on the universe.

A new image of spiral galaxy NGC 6744, which 30 million light-years away, one of several pictures take help us unravel the secrets of the cosmos - PA/ESA

Without dark energy the universe would not continue to accelerate as it expands, while galaxies rely on the gravitational heft of dark matter to keep them together. Both have been notoriously difficult to pin down.

Messier 78 – the central and brightest region in the images – is around 1,600 light years away in the Orion constellation. The foreground resembles a seahorse with bright stars lighting up the ‘eye’ and ‘chest’ regions with purple light.

Dr Marusa Zerjal, of the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands, said: “This image is unprecedented because this is the first such image with depth and sharpness and [the] large field of view actually enables us for the first time to study objects of a very low mass to such details and in uniform manner.

“We can study the number of newly formed stars, but also the number of objects that are less massive than stars, called brown dwarfs, and there are free-floating planets, or rogue planets and that is the most interesting part of this image.”

British scientists from the universities of Manchester, Nottingham and the Open University are responsible for many of the instruments on the telescope.

Dr Rebecca Bowler, Ernest Rutherford Fellow at The University of Manchester, said: “In these spectacular images we can see galaxies that were previously invisible, because the most distant galaxies can only be discovered using the longer near-infrared wavelengths seen by Euclid.

“What is amazing is that these images cover an area of less than one per cent of the full deep observations, showing that we expect to detect thousands of early galaxies in the next few years with Euclid, which will be revolutionary in understanding how and when galaxies formed after the Big Bang.”

Unlike normal matter, dark matter does not reflect or emit light. To map it, the Euclid mission will use a technique called weak gravitational lensing which works by measuring how much light is bent on its way through space, a good indicator of where dark matter is lurking.

ESA also released an image of the cluster Abell 2390, which shows giant curved arcs in the sky, caused by gravitational lensing.

Abell 2390, a galaxy cluster 2.7 billion light-years away in the constellation of Pegasus - PA/ESA

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