Euclid Telescope Unveils Stunning 3D Map of the Universe

“It’s a veritable tapestry of galaxies. There are around 100,000 of them. All these little dots, these little blocks, are the history of the Universe unfolding before our eyes. We had never seen so many at once,” he continues. These five images, revealed from the European Space Operations Center in Darmstadt, Germany, are “stunning and remind us why it is essential to go to space to learn more about the mysteries of the Universe,” said Josef Aschbacher, head of the European Space Agency (ESA), in a statement.

The telescope accomplished its task by mapping a third of the sky, encompassing two billion galaxies, to create what has been billed as the most precise 3D map of the Universe. After joining another space telescope, the James Webb, at an observation point some 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the European probe began sending its first observations.

For René Laureijs, scientific manager of the project, the most “exciting” image is that of the Perseus cluster, a distant collection of more than a thousand galaxies. Because in the background there are more than 100,000 additional galaxies, some of which are located 10 billion light years away and have never been observed.

“Detective of the Dark Universe”

Euclid’s particularity is to have a wide field of vision “never before seen in the history of astronomy”, where James Webb “looks at the sky through the eye of a needle” in particular to explore the early ages of the Universe, explained Jean-Charles Cuillandre. It is thanks to this broad view that the telescope, equipped with two devices (optical and near infrared), is able to capture such vast, high-resolution images. All extremely quickly: the first five images only took about eight hours.

The ESA describes Euclid as its “dark universe detective,” tasked with investigating why 95 percent of the cosmos appears to be made up of dark matter and dark energy, about which we know almost nothing. Dark matter, attractive, acts as a glue for galaxies, which prevents stars from being ejected. Dark, repulsive energy “is the driving force behind the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe,” explains Carole Mundell, scientific director of the ESA.