Telescope Euclid on a mission to map the sky, aiming to create a Google Earth of the universe with billions of galaxies

(Patria) - The European Space Agency (ESA) has released a photo mosaic of distant galaxies, a small part of the work that the Euclid space telescope is doing as it maps approximately one-third of the sky outside the Milky Way.

Euclid is on a mission to photograph the sky, mapping the universe outside our galaxy – the Milky Way. It was launched into space last year by a SpaceX rocket, reports HRT.

- So, Euclid is a space mission, a telescope from ESA, launched on July 1st last year. Its primary goal is to cosmologically create a three-dimensional map of the universe, mapping billions of galaxies.



We want to see how the structure has evolved over time, because the further you go, the further back in time you look. So we will go back up to 10 billion years – says ESA scientist Bruno Altieri.

The photos cover a part of the southern sky, showing an area about 500 times larger than the Moon as seen from Earth.

- It's a mosaic made up of many different tiles of where the telescope was pointed and observed. This covers only about 1% of the area that Euclid will cover by the end of its mission.

Even all the data we have already observed is just a small fraction of that – says Seshadri Nadathur, a professor of cosmology at the University of Portsmouth, who is also working on the Euclid project.

The photos were taken over a period of two weeks, and the mosaic displays about 14 million galaxies.



Although the images released to the public are not of high enough resolution for scientific work, they can still be magnified 600 times to show the fascinating glimmers of distant worlds.

- When you zoom in, you can see galaxy clusters. You can zoom in fantastically. So, this is a map of over 200 gigapixels. And what we want to build is a bit like a Google Earth of the universe, so that anyone in the future can look at the universe and see these billions of galaxies that we will map – points out Altieri.

The mission intends to shed light on two mysteries of the universe – dark matter and dark energy. Dark matter distorts the light traveling to us from distant galaxies, but scientists do not fully understand how it does so.

Dark energy is believed to be responsible for the puzzling phenomenon associated with the expanding universe.

- Since the late 1990s, we have known that the universe is not only expanding, but that it is expanding faster and faster. It is accelerating over time. And that is a very strange behavior, it must be caused by something that does not behave like normal matter, and we call that "dark energy".

We can identify some of its properties, but to really understand what it is and what drives it, what the physics behind it is, we need to make much more precise measurements and then figure out – is this behavior constant over time or is it changing. Is it evolving over time – notes Nadathur.

Euclid will spend six years mapping the sky.