Europe’s Euclid Space Telescope Reveals Dazzling Images of Galaxies
Cape Canaveral, Florida.- Scientists today revealed the first images taken by Europe’s Euclid Space Telescope, a dazzling and astonishing collection of galaxies too numerous to count.
The photos were revealed by the European Space Agency, four months after the telescope was launched from Cape Canaveral. While the celestial panoramas have been previously observed by the Hubble Space Telescope and others, Euclid’s offer “ultra-sharp astronomical images of a wide section of the sky and a deep view of the distant universe,” the agency said.
In one image, about a thousand galaxies are seen in a nucleus about 240 million light years away, against a background of more than 100 thousand galaxies billions of light years away. One light year is equivalent to 9.3 trillion kilometers (5.8 trillion miles).
“Dazzling,” said the scientific director of the space agency, Carole Mundell, when showing the photo of the nucleus of the galaxies, on a giant screen in the agency’s control center in Germany.
Euclid’s instruments are capable of detecting even the smallest galaxies, which until now were too faint to be observed. The results are “stunning, ultra-sharp images that go back in cosmic time,” Mundell said.
The telescope took images of a spiral galaxy very similar to our Milky Way. While the Hubble Space Telescope has previously observed the core of this galaxy, the new images offer a look at the entire region, scientists said.
Euclid also took new photos of the Horsehead Nebula in the constellation Orion, a dramatic group of young stars made famous by Hubble. It took Euclid just an hour to capture the new photo of the nebula; The five photos in total took less than a day to observe.