What the first images of the 3D megamap of the universe reveal

There are 100 million stars and galaxies in a first glimpse of the universe.

The European Space Agency (ESA) shared the first delivery of the map of the universe in three dimensions what he is doing with the space telescope Euclid.

This first piece is just 1% of the work started this year Euclid by observing galaxies and stars as far away as 10 billion light years.

In work that will last six years, ESA scientists will map the universe at an extraordinary level of detail. And with this, researchers will have a lot of information about the formation and evolution of deep space.

“In this image alone there are already tens of millions of galaxies, thanks to which we will be able to make statistics about where certain types of galaxies are located in relation to others, how they evolve over time, why they have not formed stars for a few thousand millions of years…” Bruno Altieri, ESA scientist in charge of the Euclid archive, told the AFP agency.

Scientists hope to have the mapping of a third of the celestial vault by 2030which is the current objective.

In its first delivery, the Euclid telescope covered 132 square degrees of heaven austral, which is about 500 times the apparent surface of the Moon.

With this he generated “the great puzzle of the universe.” Little by little it will add more pieces of a puzzle that will be completed in the coming years.

“This is only 1% of the map, and yet it is filled with a wide variety of sources that will help scientists discover new ways to describe the universe,” Valeria Pettorino, a Project Euclid scientist at the University of California, said in a statement. THAT.

One of the most striking points on the map is a strip of intense black dotted with bright points over which blue “clouds” extend, called “galactic cirrus”. It is a mixture of dust and gas “from which new stars are formed,” Altieri said.

In this image, ESA illustrated what Euclid shows in a 2 degree field. By zooming in up to 600 times, you can see the galaxies that are in that small fragment of the universe.

The map that the ESA shares on its website has a resolution rarely achieved before: 208 megapixels.

In fact, it allows you to do a wide zoom with which you can see the complex structure of a spiral galaxy or two galaxies that interact with each other.

Euclid has a wide field of view, which allows it to cover a wide range of the universe in a single image. In contrast, the James Webb Space Telescope has a lower field of view, but can see much further.

In addition to creating a highly detailed map of what is in the deep universe, the ultimate goal of this project is to shed light on one of the greatest scientific enigmas: that of dark matter and energy.

These constitute the 95% of the universe about which we know practically nothing.

Dark matter (25% of the universe) and dark energy (70%) have opposite effects: the former keeps galaxies together, while dark energy causes the universe to expand.

Thanks to its 3D map, Euclid will be able to make precise measurements of the distribution of galaxies and the expansion of the universe thus refining the theoretical models of the cosmos.