In a hint of cosmological discoveries to come, the European Space Agency’s (ESA) newly launched Euclid telescope has captured a smattering of sharp, wide-field images of galaxies near and far, including a view of the famed Horsehead Nebula that took only about an hour to render.
“Many other telescopes have taken images of the Horsehead Nebula, but none of them are able to create such a sharp and wide view as Euclid can with just one observation,” ESA said in a statement that accompanied the release of the telescope’s first images on Nov. 7.
Located about 1,375 light-years away, the Horsehead Nebula appears as a dark cloud shaped like a horse’s head in the Orion constellation. The structure is located just south of the star Alnitak, the eastern-most of the Orion constellation’s three-star belt.
Another image reveals 1,000 galaxies in the Perseus Cluster—plus 100,000 more galaxies in the background.
Euclid—named for the ancient Greek mathematician —is designed to observe the shapes and positions of billions of galaxies dating back more than 10 billion years, a span of time that includes when the universe fell under the accelerating influence of dark energy.
Euclid was launched on July 1 and reached its observation perch at the second Sun-Earth Lagrange point four weeks later. Euclid is designed to spend six years mapping the cosmos in an attempt to learn more about the 95% of the universe that does not emit electromagnetic radiation. By charting the distribution and shapes of observable galaxies, scientists can infer the influences of dark matter and dark energy.
“What makes Euclid’s view of the cosmos special is its ability to create a remarkably sharp visible and infrared image across a huge part of the sky in just one sitting,” ESA said.
Many of the faint galaxies in the Perseus Cluster image were previously unseen. “This is the first time that such a large image has allowed us to capture so many Perseus galaxies in such a high level of detail,” ESA said. “Some are so distant that their light has taken 10 billion years to reach us.”
Perseus, located about 240 million light-years from Earth, is one of the universe’s most massive known structures.
The Euclid spacecraft, built by Thales Alenia Space, is equipped with a 4-ft. dia. reflecting telescope that provides data to two science instruments: a 600-megapixel visible wavelength camera known as VIS that takes very sharp images of galaxies over a large fraction of the sky; and the 64-megapixel Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP), which can analyze galaxies’ infrared light by wavelength to accurately establish their distance.
The silicon carbide telescope, designed and built by Airbus, has a field of view about twice the diameter of the full Moon. Euclid, which cost about $1.5 billion, is designed to observe about one-third of the sky—approximately 15,000 deg.2—with unprecedented accuracy and sensitivity.
Euclid is built and operated by ESA, with contributions from NASA. The Euclid Consortium—consisting of more than 2,000 scientists from 300 institutes in 13 European countries, the U.S., Canada and Japan—provided the scientific instruments and scientific data analysis. NASA provided the near-infrared detectors of the NISP instrument.
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