Discover

In October 2024, ESA’s Euclid mission revealed the first piece of its great cosmic atlas, including millions of stars and galaxies. In this part of the mosaic, Euclid captured two galaxies interacting with each other, 420 million light-years from us.

This image shows an area of the mosaic released by ESA’s Euclid space telescope on 15 October 2024. The area is zoomed in 150 times compared to the large mosaic. 

The goal of the Euclid mission, launched in July 2023, is to map around a third of the Universe beyond the limits of the Milky Way and see how it has evolved over time. Euclid’s VIS visible light instrument employs a mosaic of 36 CCD sensors, each of which contains more than 4000 pixels by 4000 pixels. This gives the detector a total of about 600 megapixels, equivalent to almost 70 4K resolution screens. These observations are supplemented by Euclid’s NISP instrument, which splits infrared light coming from distant galaxies to derive key data, including their speed of outward expansion – measuring their ‘red shift’, on the same principle as a police radar gun.

Today, we know that as we look up into the night sky we are peering back in time into a mysteriously expanding Universe, some 14 billion years old. Astronomy outgrew the limits of the human eye and moved on to telescopes; then to peer further out into space the need became clear for space-based telescopes, beyond the distortions of Earth’s atmosphere. International cooperation has enabled progressively more powerful space-based observatories, unveiling a whole new cosmos. The NASA-ESA-CSA James Webb Space Telescope is looking back to the creation of the very first galaxies of the early Universe.