Euclid space telescope has discovered 26 million new galaxies
The consortium of the European space telescope Euclid has published its first data set. It includes many newly discovered but very old galaxies.
This image shows an area of Euclid's Deep Field South
(Image: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi)
The Euclid consortium has published the first set of data collected by the European space telescope. They show three areas of the sky with 26 million newly discovered galaxies.
The data set, a so-called quick release, consists of three images of the sky, each of which is composed of numerous individual images. All three sky panoramas together are 35 terabytes in size.
Euclid discovers galaxies over 10 billion years old
The data now published was collected in just one week. In that time, Euclid discovered 26 million previously unknown galaxies that are up to 10.5 billion light years away from Earth – The universe is around 14 billion years old. The shape and distance of over 380,000 of them were determined. In addition, 500 candidates for gravitational lensing were detected, almost all of which were unknown.
The Euclid space telescope was launched into space in the summer of 2023 and delivered its first spectacular images just a few months later.
The telescope orbits Lagrange point L2 of the Sun-Earth system, which is around 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth. From there, Euclid can observe the northern and southern skies over the course of a year.
Euclid has a 1.2 meter mirror and provides images in the visible spectrum and in the near infrared range. It has an exceptionally large field of view: an image from Euclid covers an area 240 times larger than an image taken by the Hubble telescope.
The MPI helped develop the infrared camera
The infrared camera was co-developed at the Max Planck Institutes for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) in Garching near Munich and for Astronomy in Heidelberg (MPIA). “This allows us to precisely determine the distances and clearly identify numerous galaxies and quasars in the high-resolution Euclid images,” said Christoph Saulder from MPE. To this end, the team has compiled “a catalog of over 70,000 spectroscopic redshifts from various sky surveys” and linked it to the Euclid data.
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The aim of the six-year mission is to understand what our universe is made of and how it develops. Euclid will also provide insights into dark matter and dark energy. The data set that has now been published does not yet make this possible. The publication of the mission's first cosmological data is planned for October 2026.
(wpl)
