Tomorrow June 1 at 11:12 AM the Euclid satellite will be launched by SpaceX at Cape Kennedy, it had been set to be launched by Russia but after they invaded Ukraine they pulled out and SpaceX took over. Euclid is a €1.4 billion project designed to investigate Dark Energy, the mysterious force that is causing the universe's expansion to accelerate; in particular Euclid's purpose is to find the value of Ω, a number that describes the effect Dark Energy has on that acceleration. We already know Ω is close to -1, if it's exactly -1 then the acceleration is constant and can be explained by General Relativity if even a perfect vacuum has an inherent amount of energy, but if that number is anything other than -1 then the acceleration could increase leading to a Big Rip, or decrease or even reverse leading to a Big Crunch. Euclid may provide the answers to some of the most profound questions imaginable, it will probably take a few years but in just 2 days it will be able to survey more of the universe than the Hubble telescope has managed to do in the last 30 years.
The other big astronomy news is of course yesterday's announcement of the discovery of Gravitational Waves that have a wavelength of several hundred light years. LIGO first detected Gravitational Waves several years ago but they only had a wavelength of a mile or two. Waves more than a light year long were expected to be produced by Supermassive Black Holes in the centers of galaxies; however the waves they saw were about twice as intense as expected. I've heard several theories to explain this excess, such as the wiggling of Cosmic Strings, theoretical one dimensional structures much thinner than a proton but millions or billions of light years long that have a mass of 10 million billion tons per centimeter. I've also heard some say this is evidence the universe is cyclical and what we're seeing are the Gravitational Waves produced in a Big Crunch that ended the last iteration of the universe. But nobody really knows what's causing the exces s. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> egm -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv1NJ1F5tLPwiQ2-ekzXEE7%3D7YV9F7UP1ehVHHkVx4LpTA%40mail.gmail.com.
