The spectacular image captured by a telescope that shows 60 million stars at the same time in the Milky Way

But it will not be possible to discover new exoplanets with this Euclid image alone. To detect a microlensing event, a telescope needs to observe a star for more than 20 days, something Euclid’s exceptional single-day mission was unable to do.

But if a future telescope detects two overlapping stars in the area that Euclid photographed, that image could help confirm the presence of new planets.

Valeria Pettorino told the BBC that she believes this image could lead to the discovery of “more than a thousand planets”, mainly cold planets orbiting stars, using the microlensing technique, as well as wandering planets that have drifted away from their stars.

For example, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman space telescope is scheduled to take off at the end of August. Euclid has already captured the entire region of the sky that he will monitor in his search for planets.

“Anyone who detects a microlensing event in that same region, for example with Roman, will now be able to use the Euclid data as a reference to the past and see what the stars were like before they overlapped,” explains Natalia Rektsini, from the Institute of Astrophysics in Paris, who led the publication of these Euclid data.