ESA scientists today unveiled the first part of the largest 3D map of the universe ever made.
The sparkling purplish-blue tapestry displays data from 260 observations from the Euclid Space Telescope, the agency’s most advanced dark matter observatory. The telescope has an estimated lifespan of six years and will collect data that will help scientists understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which make up 95% of the known universe.
The 208 gigapixel image shows an area of the southern sky that is approximately 500 times the area of the full moon as seen from March 25, 2024 to April 8, 2024. The image mosaic represents only 1% of the extensive research that Euclid ultimately captures. It would contain billions of galaxies stretching far into the universe’s past. This first image shows 14 million galaxies and tens of millions of stars from our own Milky Way galaxy.
“This amazing image is the first part of a map that has revealed more than a third of the sky in six years,” said Valeria Pettorino, ESA’s Euclid project scientist, in a release from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy. mentioned in. “Although this is only 1% of the map, it is packed with a variety of sources that will help scientists discover new ways to describe the universe.”
The spiral galaxy image above is part of the mosaic included at the beginning of this article. The area in the image has been enlarged approximately 600 times compared to the full-size mosaic, showing a galaxy approximately 420 million light-years from Earth. The total area of the image above is only 0.0003% of the 208 gigapixel image. This in itself represents only 1% of the total Euclid research.
The institute said about 12% of the survey has been completed so far, and about 100 gigabytes of data are being sent back to Earth from the spacecraft every day. This data will not only compose a pretty picture, but will also give scientists clues about the distribution of dark matter throughout the universe and phenomena in which dark matter appears, such as gravitational lensing.
The Euclid team released the first images of the $1.4 billion spacecraft in November 2023, showing the potential of a space observatory. These images include shots of the Perseus Galaxy Cluster, spiral and irregular galaxies, globular star clusters, and the Horsehead Nebula, and were released following test images released to the public in August 2023.
