Today, Tuesday, the European Euclid Space Telescope published the first images it took of the universe, showing a dazzling nebula resembling a horse’s head, and distant galaxies that had never been seen before, and containing “indirect evidence” of the existence of dark matter.
Euclid launched last July on the first mission of its kind internationally, aiming to uncover two cosmic mysteries: dark matter and dark energy.
The telescope accomplishes its mission by mapping a third of the sky, which includes two billion galaxies, to create what has been described as the most accurate 3D map of the universe.
After the space telescope reached another telescope, the James Webb, at a monitoring point located about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the European probe began sending the first results of the monitoring it was carrying out, and they were revealed from the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany.
A statement quoted the head of the European Space Agency, Joseph Aschbacher, as saying that these five images, which were revealed by the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, are “astonishing and a reminder of the importance of going to space to learn more about the secrets of the universe.”
Among these images, one is of the Horsehead Nebula, within the nearby Orion constellation, spiral galaxies, and others are “irregular.”
The scientific director of the project, Rene Lorig, explained that the most “exciting” image is the image of the Perseus Cluster, which is a distant group that includes more than 1,000 galaxies, as more than 100,000 additional galaxies were found in the background, some of which are located 10 billion light-years away and had not been observed before.
