In July 2023, scientists launched the Euclid Space Telescope into orbit with a straightforward, albeit massive, task: to map the dark universe, revealing the dark matter and dark energy that we cannot directly observe but makes up the bulk of everything. Now, scientists affiliated with the mission have published a huge amount of data that will inform how the team proceeds in attempting to directly detect dark energy—the mysterious stuff that apparently drives the universe’s accelerating expansion. (It’s not to be confused with dark matter, which makes up .
) Euclid’s first test images were published last August, but its first five scientific images were . Those shots—capturing a few galaxy clusters, several galaxies, and an iconic nebula—are spellbindingly beautiful, in addition to containing useful data about dark energy and dark matter. The new images are at least four times sharper than those taken with ground-based telescopes, according to a U.
K. Space Agency release, and the latest image drop includes the largest images taken of space from space. The following images are early results from the telescope and make up just 24 hours of Euclid observations.
In other words, it’s just a teaser for what scientists hope will be a prodigious portfolio of scientific data. Euclid’s visible imager (VIS) boasts a staggering 600 million pixels, while the infrared sensors on the telescope’s Near Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) add another 66 million pixels. .
