An international team of scientists, including those from our Department of Physics, are involved in a major space mission that has released five unprecedented new images of the Universe.
Durham University is a key partner of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid space telescope, which is on a six-year mission to map the dark Universe – trying to understand why it looks as it does today.
This latest release of images provides the first chunk of the map, which is a huge mosaic of more than 200,000 megapixels, containing 14 million galaxies.
The mosaic was photographed during two weeks at the end of March 2024, and is 1% of the survey that Euclid will conduct of nearly the whole sky.
During its mission, Euclid will observe the shapes, distances and motions of billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years. By doing this, it will create the largest cosmic 3D map ever made.
Durham’s physicists were key to the mission preparation using supercomputer simulations to create mock data to train Euclid’s analysis software.
Our researchers will also compare Euclid’s real observations against these simulations to help interpret the information captured by the telescope.
Professor Mathilde Jauzac, from Durham’s Institute of Computational Cosmology, is part of the team providing the gravitational lensing analysis of these early release observations from the telescope.
“If Early Release Observations released in May 2024 were already a clear demonstration of the capabilities of Euclid, this first hint of the wide survey observations confirms that Euclid will for sure open up a new era in our understanding of the dark Universe.”
This first piece of the map already contains some 14 million galaxies that could be used to study the hidden influence of dark matter and dark energy on the Universe. It also contains tens of millions of stars in our own Milky Way.
The mosaic released is a teaser for what’s to come from the Euclid mission. The next release of 53 square degrees of the survey, including a preview the Euclid Deep Field areas, is planned for March 2025.
The mission’s first year of cosmology data will be released in 2026.
Video caption: This video takes you through a rare sky dive. Starting from a vast cosmic panorama bedazzled by some 14 million galaxies, a series of ever-deeper zooms brings you to a crisp view of a swirling spiral galaxy, in a final image enlarged 600 times compared to the full mosaic. Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CEA Paris-Saclay
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