The European Space Agency (ESA) has released the first science results from its €1.4bn Euclid mission. Today, the space agency has released five spectacular images of the cosmos along with 10 scientific papers as part of Euclid’s early release observations.
Euclid was launched in July 2023 and is currently located in a spot in space called Lagrange Point 2 – a gravitational balance point some 1.5 million kilometres beyond the Earth’s orbit around the Sun. The Euclid Consortium comprises some 2600 members from more than 15 countries.
Euclid has a 1.2 m-diameter telescope, a camera and a spectrometer that it uses to plot a 3D map of the distribution of more than two billion galaxies. The images it takes are about four times as sharp as current ground-based telescopes.
In November, following weeks of calibrations, Euclid released its first full-colour images of the cosmos. Then in early 2024 it began science operations, studying 17 astronomical objects including distance galaxies and nearby dust clouds.
The images and resulting science findings released today were produced with only a single day of observations. They reveal 11 million objects in visible light and a further five million in the infrared. Some of the new discoveries include free-floating newborn planets, newly identified extragalactic star clusters and new low-mass dwarf galaxies.
The five images include a breathtaking image of Messier 78, which is a star nursery that is enveloped in interstellar dust and lies some 1300 light-years away in the Orion constellation. This marks the first time that the region has been taken as this width and depth.
“It’s no exaggeration to say that the results we’re seeing from Euclid are unprecedented,” says ESA science director Carole Mundell. “Euclid’s first images, published in November, clearly illustrated the telescope’s vast potential to explore the dark Universe, and this second batch is no different.
The other four images released today are shown below.
Galaxy cluster Abell 2390
This image of galaxy cluster Abell 2390, which lies 2.7 billion light-years away in the Pegasus constellation, reveals more than 50,000 galaxies. This giant conglomeration of galaxies contains a huge amount of mass, much of it being in the form of dark matter. This makes the cluster an ideal place to study the dark universe.
Galaxy cluster Abell 2764
This image shows the galaxy cluster Abell 2764 (top right), which lies a billion light-years away in the direction of the Pheonix constellation. It comprises hundreds of galaxies within a vast halo of dark matter. Also seen here is a very bright foreground star, known as V*BP-Phoenicis, which lies within our own galaxy and is almost bright enough to be seen by the human eye.
Galaxy NGC 6744
NGC 6744, which lies some 30 million light-years away, is a typical example of the kind of galaxy that is currently forming most of the stars in our local Universe. Euclid’s large field-of-view covers the entire galaxy, capturing not only spiral structure on larger scales but also smaller details such as lanes of dust emerging from “spurs” from the spiral arms. The dataset will allow Euclid to identify clusters of old stars and search for new dwarf galaxies.
Dorado galaxy group
Euclid captures galaxies evolving and merging ‘in action’ in the Dorado galaxy group, which lies some 62 million light-years away. As Dorado is a lot younger than other clusters, several of its constituent galaxies are forming stars and are still interacting with each other. Scientists are using these images to study how galaxies evolve and collide over time.
Tackling the big questions
Over the coming six years, Euclid will continue to study the large-scale structure of the universes, creating the largest cosmic 3D map ever made, with the aim of understanding how the universe evolved following the Big Bang.
“This space telescope intends to tackle the biggest open questions in cosmology,” notes Euclid project scientist Valeria Pettorino. “And these early observations clearly demonstrate that Euclid is more than up to the task.”
Euclid’s next data release will focus on its primary science objectives and is currently slated for March 2025 with a wider data release scheduled for June 2026.
