New discoveries, soon

Euclid’s first view of the cosmos is not only beautiful, but also immensely valuable for the scientific community.

Firstly, it showcases that Euclid’s telescope and instruments are performing extremely well and that astronomers can use Euclid to study the distribution of matter in the Universe and its evolution at the largest scales. Combining many observations of this quality covering large areas of the sky will show us the dark and hidden parts of the cosmos.

Secondly, each image individually contains a wealth of new information about the nearby Universe (click on the individual images to learn more about this). “In the coming months, scientists in the Euclid Consortium will analyse these images and publish a series of scientific papers in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, together with papers about the scientific objectives of the Euclid mission and the instrument performance,” adds Yannick Mellier, Euclid Consortium lead.

And finally, these images take us beyond the realm of dark matter and dark energy, also showing how Euclid will create a treasure trove of information about the physics of individual stars and galaxies.

Euclid launched to the Sun-Earth Lagrange point 2 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, USA, at 17:12 CEST on 1 July 2023. In the months after launch, scientists and engineers have been engaged in an intense phase of testing and calibrating Euclid’s scientific instruments. The team is doing the last fine-tuning of the spacecraft before routine science observations begin in early 2024.

Over six years, Euclid will survey one third of the sky with unprecedented accuracy and sensitivity. As the mission progresses, Euclid’s bank of data will be released once per year, and will be available to the global scientific community via the Astronomy Science Archives hosted at ESA’s European Space Astronomy Centre in Spain.