Excited by the luxury of detail, the scientific director of the European Space Agency (ESA), Carole Mundell, estimated that to present this mosaic of 260 images in high resolution, more than 16,000 4K TV screens would be needed. The first results were presented on October 15 within the framework of the International Astronautical Congressin Italy.
The ensemble, which covers a region of the sky in the southern hemisphere, required two weeks of observations by Euclid in March and April. This puzzle of 260 images is therefore destined to become itself a very small part of the immense final puzzle.
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Launched in July 2023, Euclid “delivered” its first images in November of the same year, already offering a taste precision to come. The space telescope, a million and a half kilometers from Earth, is designed to trainover the next five years, the 3D map of the cosmos—or the “cosmic atlas”— the most precise everrepresenting a third of our night sky.
So far, the ESA says, it has done 12% of the work, and more “deep sky” mosaics are due to be made public in March 2025.
Incidentally, this precision could contribute to identifying the “imprint” of mysterious dark energy and dark matter, through their interactions with visible matter: in other words, although these fundamental constituents of the cosmos are invisible – hence their name – and we do not even know their composition, it would be theoretically possible, by observing the way in which visible matter is distributed on a (very) large scale, to understand the characteristics of this “invisible” portion of the cosmos.
Above: The European Space Agency’s video showcasing the new images
