This image shows some of the many galaxies of varying shapes captured by the Euclid telescope during its first deep-field observations. (Image credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by M. Walmsley, M. Huertas-Company, J.-C. Quillandre)
The European Space Agency (ESA) has just released the first batch of data from the revolutionary Euclid space telescope, designed to study the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy in our Universe.
The data, released March 19, contain initial scans of three regions that Euclid will regularly observe, as well as detailed classifications of more than 380,000 galaxies—just 0.4 percent of the total number of galaxies scientists plan to catalog over the mission's planned six-year lifespan.
“With the release of the first data from Euclid, we are opening up a treasure trove of information for scientists to explore to tackle some of the most exciting questions in modern science,” said ESA Director of Science Carol Mundell.
Launched in July 2023 and starting collecting data in February 2024, Euclid aims to map the large-scale structure of the Universe. Understanding this structure through the shapes, sizes, and distribution of galaxies could help researchers uncover the nature of dark matter and dark energy — two mysterious phenomena that together make up about 95% of the Universe but do not interact with light and therefore cannot be studied directly.
“The full potential of Euclid to study dark matter and dark energy through the large-scale structure of the cosmic web will only be revealed once the entire study is complete,” said Clotilde Leigl, a scientist at the Euclid Consortium at the Paris Institute of Astrophysics, in a statement. “However, the volume of this first data release already provides us with a unique first glimpse into the large-scale organization of galaxies, which we can use to learn more about how they form over time.”
The March 19 release includes one scan of each of the deep field regions, three patches of sky that Euclid will visit repeatedly to observe distant regions of the universe. In these first images, the telescope captured 26 million galaxies, the most distant of which are 10.5 billion light-years away. (A light-year is the distance light travels in one year — about 5.9 trillion miles, or 9.5 trillion kilometers.)
This close-up view of the Euclid telescope's Southern Deep Field shows only a small fraction of the galaxies.
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