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Launched into space last summer, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid telescope is imaging the universe and shedding light on cosmological mysteries. Now, scientists have offered a new glimpse of its photographic and scientific potential.
This week, the agency released five new images—the telescope’s second batch—which included breathtaking views of galaxy clusters, a dust-wrapped stellar nursery and one of the largest spiral galaxies beyond the nearby universe.
“I’ve been absolutely amazed at the images I’ve seen,” Mark Cropper, the lead scientist on Euclid’s visual imaging camera and an astrophysicist at University College London, tells the Guardian’s Ian Sample. “These are not just pretty pictures; these images are packed with new information.”
Euclid has been nicknamed the “dark universe detective” for what astronomers hope will be its ability to glean new information about dark matter, which composes 27 percent of the cosmos and helps to bring galaxies together, and dark energy, which makes up an estimated 68 percent of the universe and is the force behind its mysterious expansion.
Over the next six years, the powerful space telescope will peer as far as ten billion light-years across the cosmos, constructing the largest 3D map of the universe to date. Because dark matter bends and warps light, a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, astronomers will study light in Euclid’s images to get a better idea of how dark matter is distributed in space.
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This distortion effect was captured in the new image of Abell 2390, a galaxy cluster 2.7 billion light-years away in the constellation Pegasus. Some 90 percent of the cluster’s mass is attributed to dark matter. Several of the 50,000 galaxies in Euclid’s photograph are impacted by the invisible substance, which can also create mirror images of a single object.
“One of the things we see is these giant arcs here, these smooth arcs that are curved, those are actually very distant galaxies that have their shapes hugely distorted by the gravity of the dark matter in the cluster,” Jason Rhodes, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said during an ESA broadcast, reports Space.com’s Robert Lea. “And some of these arcs are even multiple images of the same very distant galaxy.”
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In another scene closer to home—roughly 1,300 light-years away and still within the Milky Way galaxy—Euclid photographed newly formed planets and stars within Messier 78, a star-forming nebula in the Orion constellation. The telescope captured more than 300,000 new objects within this single image, and astronomers are now examining the ratio of newly formed stars to other objects.
Euclid’s image of the nebula also uncovered free-floating “rogue” planets just four times the mass of Jupiter, which could also shed light on the effects of dark matter. Messier 78’s dusty clouds would normally shield these subjects from view, but the telescope’s infrared vision can peer through the wispy matter.
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Other discoveries include a never-before-seen dwarf galaxy, found within a new image of NGC 6744, a spiral galaxy 30 million light-years away in the constellation Pavo. This discovery was “a surprise, given that this galaxy has been intensively studied in the past,” according to the ESA. The movement of NGC 6744’s dust, gas and stars will help researchers glean a better understanding of how spiral galaxies get their shape—and how these components are linked to star formation.
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Finally, Euclid imaged the Dorado galaxy group, which lies 62 million light-years away. The photograph’s centerpiece comprises the group’s two main galaxies, which are “evolving and merging… with beautiful tidal tails and shells visible as a result of ongoing interactions,” per the ESA.
The new observations underscore how common interactions between galaxies are.
“It’s very rare to find an isolated galaxy,” Jean-Charles Cuillandre, an astronomer at CEA Paris-Saclay, tells the New York Times’ Katrina Miller. “That’s what we’re finding out.”
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These images and others were acquired in just 24 hours of observation, ahead of the telescope’s main survey of the sky. With these new views, Euclid captured 11 million objects in visible light and five million objects in infrared light. Its next batch of images is set to be released in March 2025.
“Euclid is a unique, ground-breaking mission, and these are the first datasets to be made public—it’s an important milestone,” Valeria Pettorino, a physicist and Euclid project scientist with the ESA, says in a statement. “This space telescope intends to tackle the biggest open questions in cosmology… And these early observations clearly demonstrate that Euclid is more than up to the task.”
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