DARK MATTER MATTERS

THE LAST FEW WEEKS have seen much action and excitement in the science arena

- Kiran Karnik

At home, there was news about the creation of a National Research Foundation (first announced some years ago).

Globally, the detection of low frequency gravity waves – the hum of the universe – was cause for a louder buzz amongst scientists. Worldwide interest in India’s space programme was exemplified by an article on space startups in a prominent US newspaper, while the scientific community eagerly awaited the mid-July launch of Chandrayan-3 (expected on 14 July, at the time of writing). Each of these warrants a discussion: for what they mean, but also about their implications for business and industry.

This column discusses another significant event: the launch of the European Space Agency’s Euclid spacecraft on 1 July, carried aloft by the Falcon 9 rocket of SpaceX. Euclid is, of course, familiar to us as the Greek mathematician, often considered the “father of geometry”. The eponymously named billion-dollar space mission is aimed at studying so-called dark matter and dark energy, which account for 95 per cent of the known universe. To do this, the space telescope on the two-tonne spacecraft will look across one-third of the sky, with its power enabling such far-sightedness as to look back 10 billion years. The James Webb Space Telescope, carried on-board a US spacecraft in December 2021, enables us to look back even further – 13 billion years – but with different objectives (this column covered it in the piece on “Time Travel” – BW Businessworld, 27 August 2022).

DARK MATTER