THE JELLYFISH NEBULA

Jellyfish in space?!

The Hubble telescope has recently captured some photos of the “Jellyfish” nebula JO206. JO206 lies over 700 million light-years from Earth in the constellation of Aquarius “Jellyfish” galaxies are named this way because of their relation to the aquatic sea creature JO206 is a galaxy that is made up of a colourful star-forming disk that is surrounded by pale clouds of dust Due to the interaction between galaxies, trails of stars can be seen resembling the “tentacles” of the “jellyfish”. These “tentacles” allow astronomers opportunities to study star formations under extreme conditions, far from the main body of the Jellyfish galaxy However, Hubble revealed that there are no significant differences between star formations in the main body of the Jellyfish galaxy and star formations in their tentacles This suggests the environment of the newly formed stars only has a minor influence on their formation

The dark secrets soon to be unravelled:

In a few weeks, a European space probe will be sent into space, with scientists hoping the Euclid telescope will reveal some of the mysteries of dark matter The telescope very aptly gets its name from the Ancient Greek mathematician who invented axiomatic geometry

The £850 million mission will investigate dark energy and dark matter which remain unfathomable to scientists

Dark matter is the name given to the force that was proved to be accelerating the expansion of the universe –a discovery made in 1998 Dark energy and dark matter both remain invisible to humans, but scientists have been able to infer their existence by measuring their impact on the unusual behaviour of other stars and galaxies It is believed it is invisible because most of the particles probably do not emit, reflect, or absorb light

Euclid was intended to be launched last year on the Russian Soyuz rocket However, after the invasion of Ukraine, the European Space Agency ended its cooperation with Russia but agreed to use a Falcon 9 from Elon Musk’s SpaceX company It is currently scheduled to launch on 1 July and is estimated to take a month to cross the solar system to its destination 15 million km from Earth It will be stationed at a position known as the second Lagrange point; here the craft will be able to look out into deep space Euclid is also able to able to survey one-third of the night sky at a time - this precision is crucial to uncovering the secrets of dark matter To avoid the fact dark matter cannot be seen, Euclid will be using a technique known as gravitational lensing This involves taking millions of images of galaxies. In certain cases, light from these distant galaxies will pass through dark matter on its journey toward Earth

When that happens, its gravitational field will stretch and deflect the path of the light This is gravitational lensing and the distorted pictures it produces will provide key discoveries into the nature of dark matter

The product of this incredible work will be the understanding of how the universe has expanded over the past 10 billion years It is hoped that Euclid could help to unravel the mysterious secrets of dark energy and dark matter More on this in the next edition of The Castle!