Space, Esa publishes glimpse of the new map of the universe

The European Space Agency (ESA) has published a glimpse of the giant map of the universe it is developing thanks to the Euclid space telescope. From the International Astronautical Congress, which this year stops in Milan, the director general Josef Aschbacher and the scientific director Carole Mundell presented the “trailer” of what will become the most detailed cosmic atlas in the world.

The section shown to the public is an immense 208 gigapixel photographic mosaic made up of 260 observations taken between March 25 and April 8, 2024. “In just two weeks, Euclid covered 132 square degrees of the southern sky in pristine detail, more than 500 times the area of ​​the full moon,” explains the European space agency in a statement seen by Adnkronos.

“This stunning image is the first part of a map that in six years will reveal more than a third of the sky. It is only 1% of the map, yet it is full of a variety of sources that will help scientists discover new ways of describing the universe,” says Euclid project scientist Valeria Pettorino.

The mission’s goal is to use the telescope to observe the shapes, distances and motions of billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light-years away. This first section contains about 14 million galaxies as well as tens of millions of stars from our Milky Way.

One of the main applications of the data produced by Euclid (which also includes spectrographic data in addition to images) is the study of the hidden influence of dark matter and dark energy on the universe, through the analysis of the last ten billion years of our cosmic history.

The consortium behind the Euclid mission includes 15 European countries, plus the United States, Canada and Japan. The telescope was built in the Thales Alenia Space laboratories in Turin. Launched in July 2023 from Cape Canaveral in Florida, today it orbits at a point of equilibrium between the Earth and the Sun, where NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope and ESA’s Gaia are also located.

The mapping mission, which began in February, has already covered 12% of the final atlas. ESA plans to release the next section of the star map in March 2025, while the mission’s first year of cosmological data will be released to the scientific community in 2026.