ESA's Euclid Mission Captures Captivating First Test Images on Its Journey to Explore Dark Matter and Dark Energy

The mesmerising images confirm that the space telescope is on track to achieve the scientific goals that it has been designed for and that its telescope and instruments are working well.

Giuseppe Racca, the Euclid project manager, expressed his excitement, stating, "After more than 11 years of designing and developing Euclid, it's exhilarating and enormously emotional to see these first images."

"It's even more incredible when we think that we see just a few galaxies here, produced with minimum system tuning. The fully calibrated Euclid will ultimately observe billions of galaxies to create the biggest ever 3D map of the sky," he added.

Euclid launched on July 1 from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It has arrived at its destination the Second Lagrange Point (L2), located approximately 1 million miles (1.5 million km) away from Earth.

The images were taken using Euclid’s visible-wavelength camera (VIS) and Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP). The VIS captures sharp images of galaxies over a vast portion of the sky, while the NISP analyses galaxies' infrared light to accurately determine their distances.

The image in question is full of details, the area of sky that it covers is only about a quarter of the width and height of the full Moon.

By combining distance information with that on galaxy shapes measured by VIS, we will be able to map how galaxies are distributed throughout the Universe, and how this distribution changes over time. Ultimately, this 3D map will teach us about dark matter and dark energy.

In the image, before reaching the NISP detector the light from Euclid's telescope has passed through a filter that measures the brightness at a specific infrared wavelength.

In the second image, the light from Euclid's telescope had to pass through a 'grism' before it reached the detector. This device splits light from every star and galaxy by wavelength, so each vertical streak of light in the image is one star or galaxy.

This special way of looking at the Universe allows astronomers to determine what each galaxy is made of, which allows them to evaluate its distance from Earth.

Mission specialists will continue performance-verification tests for the next couple of months before science observations begin.

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The above article has been published from a wire source with minimal modifications to the headline and text.