Euclid’s First Big Data Drop Maps 26 Million Galaxies to Illuminate the Dark Cosmos

The Euclid space telescope is on a mission to map more than one third of the entire sky, observing billions of galaxies over a span of six years to gather data about the universe’s dark side. In its first big data release, the telescope produced a beautiful mosaic of millions of distant galaxies with different shapes and sizes, giving us a glimpse of its power to peer into the cosmos.

On Wednesday, the European Space Agency (ESA) released the first catalog of data from the Euclid space telescope, surveying an area equivalent to more than 300 times the size of the full Moon. For the first release of the telescope’s six-year survey, Euclid has scouted three patches of the sky where it will later make its deep observations of the cosmos.

The telescope captured 26 million galaxies in detail, with more than 380,000 galaxies characterized according to their shape and distance from Earth. The most distant of the galaxies lies 10.5 billion light years away. Scientists from around the world have already begun using the data to improve their understanding of the universe.

A team of researchers from the Universities of Oxford, Portsmouth, and Newcastle collaborated with citizen scientists to sift through the data to identify strong gravitational lenses. Gravitational lenses are when massive objects, such as galaxies, distort spacetime around them, acting as a magnifying glass for distant objects by causing the light behind them to bend.

Although gravitational lenses are hard to spot, the team identified 500 strong lens candidates in the data thus far. To date, there are less than 1,000 known strong lenses. “These lenses are already allowing us to learn about our Universe, but this is just the beginning for Euclid,” Natalie Lines, PhD student at the University of Portsmouth, said in a statement. “The full Euclid survey will be a revolution for strong lensing.”

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (MPE) have compiled a catalog using various sky surveys and combined it with the Euclid data in order to help identify numerous galaxies in the high-resolution images and measure their distance away from Earth. “It serves as a foundation for a deeper understanding of these objects, their distribution, and their internal properties,” Christoph Saulder, a researcher at MPE who led this part of the project, said in a statement.

The $1.4 billion Euclid telescope launched on July 1, 2023 on a mission to create the most extensive 3D map of the universe yet. Euclid is examining the dark universe—the roughly 95% of our cosmos that’s made up of dark energy and dark matter—using a visible light camera (VIS), a near-infrared camera, and a spectrometer (NISP).

Although the telescope is just getting started on its mission, it has already delivered some impressive snapshots of the dark cosmos. In February, Euclid captured an Einstein Ring in the galaxy NGC 6505, which is about 590 million light-years from Earth.

The mission’s first release of cosmology data will take place in October 2026.

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