Experts from the European Space Agency (ESA) presented the “first page” of the largest three-dimensional atlas of the Universe ever created. The fragment was obtained using the Euclid space telescope and captured 14 million galaxies. This was reported on the official ESA website.
The goal of the Euclid mission is not only to take pictures of visible space, but also to study dark energy and dark matter.
The newly obtained data is a mosaic with a total resolution of 208 gigapixels and covers only 1% of the space that is supposed to be mapped.
The selection consists of the results of 260 observations made between March 25 and April 8, 2024. In two weeks, Euclid covered 132 square degrees of the sky, more than 500 times the area of the full Moon.
The ESA noted that the first part of the map already contains about 100 million sources: stars in our Milky Way and galaxies beyond it. About 14 million of these galaxies can be used to study the hidden influence of dark matter and dark energy on the Universe.
The completed atlas is expected to be compiled from six years of observations and cover a third of the sky with billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light years away.
