More than 1,500 billion orphaned stars wandering homeless, 29 ancient galaxies providing information on the first billion years of the cosmos and much more, for a total of 11 million objects revealed in visible light and another 5 million in infrared light: it is this is the rich spoils of the first year of life of the European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope, launched in July 2023, which is now celebrating with five unprecedented views of the universe.
The first discoveries made on the basis of these data are published today in various studies available on arXiv, the platform that hosts articles not yet subjected to scrutiny by the scientific community. For astrophysicists, the results obtained so far are just the tip of the iceberg and demonstrate the incredible capabilities of this 'cosmic detective'.
The images obtained by Euclid are at least four times sharper than those that can be obtained from ground-based telescopes: they cover vast portions of the sky at an unrivaled depth, looking far into the distant Universe using both visible and infrared light, specifies the Hex.
“This space telescope intends to address the biggest open questions in cosmology – says Valeria Pettorino, ESA researcher for the Euclid project – and these first observations clearly demonstrate that Euclid is more than up to the task”.
Euclid, 4k images