Paris: A mind-boggling number of shining galaxies, a purple and orange star nursery and a spiral galaxy similar to our Milky Way: new images were revealed from Europe's Euclid space telescope on Thursday. It is the second set of images released by the European Space Agency since Euclid launched last year on the first-ever mission to investigate the mysteries of dark matter and dark energy. Scientific data from Euclid was also published for the first time in the six-year mission, which aims to use its wide view to chart two billion galaxies across a third of the sky.
Euclid project scientist Rene Laureijs told AFP that he was "personally most excited" about the image of a massive cluster of galaxies called Abell 2390. The image of the cluster, which is 2.7 billion light years away from Earth, encompasses more than 50,000 galaxies.
Just one galaxy -- such as our own -- can be home to hundreds of billions or even trillions of stars, each of which could be bigger than the Sun.In Abell 2390, Euclid was able to detect the faint light of "orphan stars" drifting between galaxy clusters, said Jean-Charles Cuillandre, a French scientist working on Euclid. These stars are ejected from the galaxies, "creating a kind of cloud which surrounds the entire cluster," Cuillandre told AFP.
According to astronomers, this strange phenomenon points towards the presence of dark matter between the galaxies. Dark matter and dark energy are thought to make up 95 percent of the universe -- but we know a.
