“On 15 October 2024, ESA’s Euclid space mission revealed the first piece of its great map of the Universe, showing millions of stars and galaxies. This first chunk of the map, which is a huge mosaic of 208 gigapixels, was revealed at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan, Italy.”
Sneak preview (14 million galaxies). Amazing first glimpse, the Euclid is out there to explore dark energy and dark matter to understand the universe’s expansion and structure. Different than the JWST – it has two primary instruments: the Visible Imaging Channel (VIS) and the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP). It observes in visible and near-infrared wavelengths. VIS captures high-resolution images to measure galaxy shapes, while NISP captures spectra to measure distances and redshifts of galaxies. It covers a large portion of the sky (roughly one-third) to create a comprehensive 3D map of the universe, and it will survey over a billion galaxies over six years.
“ESA’s Euclid mission is designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark Universe. The space telescope will create a great map of the large-scale structure of the Universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years, across more than a third of the sky. Euclid will explore how the Universe has expanded and how structure has formed over cosmic history, revealing more about the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter.”