SHAFAQNA – European Space Agency scientists have published the first part of the largest ever three-dimensional map of the universe, which contains 14 million galaxies.
The Euclid Space Telescope revealed the “first page” of the “Cosmic Atlas” it is building. A section of Euclid’s map of the universe was released on Monday, October 15, and includes tens of millions of stars within the Milky Way and about 14 million distant galaxies. outside our own galaxy.
The bright blue-purple texture displays data from 260 observations by the Euclid Space Telescope, the European Space Agency’s advanced dark matter observatory. Over the telescope’s expected lifetime of six years, it will collect data that will help scientists understand the nature of dark matter and dark energy, which together make up 95% of the known universe.
The 208-gigapixel image shows an area of the southern sky about 500 times the area of the full moon, as seen between March 25, 2024 and April 8, 2024.
The image mosaic represents only 1% of the massive survey that Euclid will eventually capture, which will include billions of galaxies stretching far into the history of the universe.
This first image shows 14 million galaxies, as well as tens of millions of stars from our own Milky Way.
“This stunning image is the first piece of map to reveal more than a third of the sky in six years,” said Valeria Pettorino, the European Space Agency’s Euclid project scientist, in a statement sent by the Institute Astronomy Max Planck out. . “This represents only 1% of the map, but it is full of many sources that will help scientists find new ways to describe the universe.”
By taking a broader view of the universe and then narrowing it down, the deep detail that Euclid enables allows astronomers to move deeply into the mosaics and structures of the universe. -complex seen, such as the shape of the spiral galaxy ESO 364-G036, located about 420 million. a light-year from Earth.
In the image of the spiral galaxy, the area is magnified about 600 times compared to the full-size mosaic.
According to scientists, about 12% of Euclid’s planned data collection has been completed so far, with about 100 gigabytes of data sent to Earth from the spacecraft every day.
This data will do more than just create pretty pictures, as it will provide scientists with evidence of the distribution of dark matter throughout the universe, as well as the phenomena in which dark matter manifests itself, such as in gravitational lenses.
It is worth noting that Euclid was launched in July 2023, and began conducting scientific studies in February. The cost of this space mission was around 1.4 billion dollars.
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