The first part of what will one day be the largest 3D map of the universe ever, filled with 14 million galaxies, has been unveiled.
The image was taken by the European Space Agency (ESA). Euclid Space Telescope. Launched on July 1, 2023, Euclid was designed to collect wide-lens images to help scientists search for two of the universe’s most mysterious components: Dark matter and Dark energy.
The stunning new image is a 208-gigapixel mosaic, representing just a hundredth of the sky. By taking hundreds of images like this, the space telescope will eventually be able to achieve this Catalog of one-third of the entire night sky The image of more than a billion galaxies up to 10 billion years old, according to the European Space Agency.
“This amazing image is the first piece of a map that will reveal more than a third of the sky in six years.” Valeria PettorinoProject Euclid scientist at the European Space Agency, He said in a statement. “This represents only 1% of the map, yet it is filled with a variety of sources that will help scientists discover new ways to describe the universe.”
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The image released is a mosaic of 260 observations collected over a two-week period between March and April 2024. It represents a 132-square-degree survey of the southern sky, more than 500 times the area of a full moon.
The map, which contains 100 million light sources, is just a small piece in the cosmic puzzle that Euclid is assembling. When completed, it will enable scientists to explore the secrets of dark matter and dark energy.
Researchers believe that dark matter and dark energy together make up about 95% of the universe. But they do not interact with light, so they cannot be detected directly.
Instead, scientists study the mysterious components by observing the way they interact with the visible universe around them: dark matter can be seen by observing the effects of gravitational distortion on galaxies, and dark energy manifests itself as a driving force. Unbridled universe expansion.
So far, 12% of Euclid’s task has been completed. Other versions, including preview Euclid’s deep field regionsIt is scheduled to launch in March 2025, and cosmology data for the mission’s first year will appear in 2026.
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