When the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid telescope launched last year, it promised to study a huge swath of the sky to help understand the mysteries of dark matter. Now, after overcoming some icy challenges in its first year of operation, ESA has published a first look at the big cosmic atlas Euclid is building.
Built from 260 observations taken in just two weeks in March and April of this year, the first piece of the map is a huge 208 gigapixel mosaic. A video zooming in on the mosaic areas shows how detailed the images of the mosaic are. Southern Sky covering 14 million distant galaxies, plus tens of millions of stars within our own Milky Way:
“This impressive image is the first piece of a map that within six years will reveal more than a third of the sky. “This is only 1% of the map, and yet it is filled with a variety of sources that will help scientists discover new ways to describe the Universe.” said Valeria Pettorino, ESA's Euclid project scientist.
In addition to the video, ESA has selected some particularly striking images of the mosaic, magnified between 12 and 150 times compared to the entire map fragment. These show beautiful spiral galaxies, vast galaxy clusters and also tiny, faint dwarf galaxies.
“We have already seen beautiful high-resolution images of individual objects and groups of objects from Euclid. “This new image finally gives us a glimpse of the enormity of the area of sky that Euclid will cover, allowing us to take detailed measurements of billions of galaxies,” said Jason Rhodes of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
The next step for the giant cosmic map is its planned release in March 2025, which will include a preview of extremely detailed images of particular areas of scientific interest called the Euclid Deep Fields. So far, the mission has completed 12% of its large-scale survey, so this telescope will provide many more amazing data.
“What really surprises me about these new images is the enormous variety of physical scales,” said Mike Seiffert of JPL. “The images capture details from star clusters near a particular galaxy to some of the largest structures in the universe. “We are starting to see the first indications of what the full Euclid data will look like when the main survey is completed.”