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Europe’s Euclid space telescope releases first images

Europe's Euclid space telescope releases first images

The first images from Europe’s Euclid space telescope were released on Tuesday, showing a nebula resembling a horse’s head, never-before-seen distant galaxies and even “circumstantial evidence” of elusive dark matter.

Euclid blasted off in July on the world’s first-ever mission aiming to investigate the enduring cosmic mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

It will do so partly by charting one third of the sky — encompassing a mind-boggling two billion galaxies — to create what has been billed as the most accurate 3D map of the universe ever.

After joining fellow space telescope James Webb at a stable hovering spot around 1.5 million kilometres (more than 930,000 miles) from Earth, Euclid started sending back its first observations.

The first five images were unveiled during a press conference at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany.

A close-up shot of the image of the Perseus Cluster, which contains some galaxies 10 billion light years away that have never been seen before

European Space Agency chief Josef Aschbacher praised the more than 3,600 people who contributed to the project, hailing “a milestone for European science and exploration”.

ESA science director Carole Mundell said that the “exquisite images over vast areas of the sky taken very quickly to great depths with razor sharp precision” showed what Euclid was capable of.

They include a majestic shot of the nearby Horsehead Nebula, as well as spiral and “irregular” galaxies.

‘Dark universe detective’

But Euclid project scientist Rene Laureijs told AFP that most exciting for the team was the image of the Perseus Cluster, a distant collection of more than a thousand galaxies.

Lurking in the background of the cluster is more than 100,000 additional galaxies, some of which are 10 billion light years away and have never been seen before, according to the ESA.

Jean-Charles Cuillandre, another scientist working on Euclid, told AFP that Euclid is different to other space telescopes because it takes in a very wide field of view, “like never before seen in the history of astronomy”.

In comparison, the Webb telescope “looks at the sky through the eye of a needle,” he said.

This wide view means it can capture such broad images extremely quickly, without having to stitch together many different observations. The images released on Tuesday only took the telescope eight hours to capture.

The ESA has dubbed Euclid its “dark universe detective”, charged with investigating why 95 percent of the universe appears to be made up of dark matter and dark energy, which we know very little about.

“Dark matter pulls galaxies together and causes them to spin more rapidly than visible matter alone can account for; dark energy is driving the accelerated expansion of the universe,” Mundell explained.



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