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Euclid: The new starry sky - 26 million galaxies in view!
The University of Bonn presents current progress on the Euclid space telescope, which is revolutionizing the universe and has already discovered 26 million galaxies.
Euclid: The new starry sky - 26 million galaxies in view!
The Euclid Space Telescope, launched on July 1, 2023 from Cape Canaveral Spaceport in Florida, has begun regular operations and is now on its way to mapping the universe in unprecedented detail. With a large field of view that captures 240 times more than the Hubble Telescope, Euclid will gain crucial new insights into dark matter and dark energy over the next six years.
Euclid is in orbit around the L2 Lagrange point, about 1.5 million kilometers from Earth. After a 30-day journey to this equilibrium point, the telescope will collect its first data using a 600-megapixel camera. This camera captures light in the visible and infrared spectrum and can therefore image not only large clusters of galaxies, but also distant planets without their parent star.
First results and data
As of the current date of March 19, 2025, Euclid has already observed 2,000 square degrees of sky, which is 14% of the planned coverage area. An impressive 26 million galaxies were discovered, which are up to 10.5 billion light-years away. The chemical and structural properties of these galaxies are brought together in an initial catalog, while the data rate is around 100 gigabytes per day, which corresponds to around 30 to 40 movies per day.
An initial catalog of over 380,000 galaxies has been created based on characteristic features, and the discovery of 500 candidates for strong gravitational lensing is a significant advance. These effects are crucial for studying the distribution of dark matter in the universe. The next step in the mission is the publication of the first cosmological data in October 2026.
New discoveries by Euclid
The first images, released on November 7, 2023, show impressive structures and phenomena in the universe, including the galaxy cluster Abell 2390, which is about three billion light-years away. These images not only reveal the beauty of the universe, but also show that Euclid discovered more than 1.5 trillion orphan stars in the Perseus cluster of galaxies.
In addition, wandering planets that are not tied to a specific star have also been identified. Estimates of the number of such planets in our galaxy number in the billions. In the coming years, Euclid will study the outer regions of star clusters and discover new globular clusters and dwarf galaxies.
Through its comprehensive measurements and data collection, which is comparable to data collection by the James Webb Space Telescope, Euclid offers the possibility of creating a 3D or 4D map of the universe, thus taking a look into the past around ten billion years ago. The first survey data, covering a variety of galaxy clusters, active galactic nuclei and variable phenomena, already provide a promising outlook for future research.