Nearly 900 million galaxies appear in the initial data release from the European Space Agency telescope, L’Express reported.
The spacecraft launched in 2023 to map the universe in three dimensions. It aims to cover roughly one third of the sky and capture more than ten billion years of cosmic history over its mission lifetime.
He told L'Express that the project delivers the largest high-resolution image of the universe ever obtained.
The mission targets dark matter, an invisible substance that scientists deduce exists through its gravitational effects on visible objects. Visible stars, planets, and gas account for only 5% of the universe, while dark matter allegedly makes up 25%.
Researchers track this invisible mass using gravitational lenses where background light bends around intervening massive structures. Euclid has identified roughly 15,000 candidates for these lensing phenomena, up from about 1,000 previously known instances.
Dark energy accounts for the remaining 70% of the universe and drives the acceleration of cosmic expansion observed since the 1990s. This force behaves as a property of space itself rather than a detectable particle.
Euclid will track how this acceleration evolved across different epochs by comparing galaxy distributions throughout cosmic history. The gathered data will test primary models of the universe where 95% of the total composition remains poorly understood.
“There is a multitude of objects that we would never have seen before, a multitude of phenomena to study,” Taylor told L’Express, noting that the data volume exceeds human analytical capacity.
The European Space Agency telescope aims to build a 3-dimensional map covering about one third of the sky. It collects spectral data from more than 160 million sources to examine cosmic history spanning over ten billion years.
Euclid analyzes gravitational lenses where the light of background galaxies is stretched and distorted by intervening mass. By measuring these distortions, astronomers estimate the distribution of both visible matter and invisible dark matter.
Dark matter accounts for roughly 25% of the universe and acts as an invisible structural scaffolding for galaxies through gravitational attraction. Dark energy represents about 70% of the universe and functions as a property of space that accelerates cosmic expansion.