Five impressive new ones aspects of the universewhich were “captured” by the space mission Euclid of the European Space Agency (ESA) are published today, almost eleven months after the mission’s launch.

The new images accompany the mission’s first science data also released today and ten upcoming science papers.

The scientist of the Euclid project, Valeria Petorino, speaks of “an important milestone”. “The images and related scientific findings are strikingly different in terms of objects and distances observed. They include a variety of scientific applications and yet represent just 24 hours of observations. They just give an idea of ​​what Euclid can do. We look forward to another six years of data to come,” he notes.

The space telescope’s first observations targeted 17 astronomical objects, from nearby clouds of gas and dust to distant galaxy clusters, and revealed more than eleven million objects in visible light and an additional five million in infrared light.

The telescope aims to reveal the secrets of the dark universe. It will map billions of galaxies across more than a third of the sky, explore how the universe formed and evolved, and study its most mysterious components: dark energy and dark matter. According to ESA, the images taken by this space telescope are at least four times sharper than those we can get from ground-based telescopes.

The first image published is of the Abell 2390 galaxy cluster and reveals more than 50,000 galaxies. The second showcases Messier 78, a nursery of stars surrounded by interstellar dust, in which the telescope identified hidden star-forming regions for the first time by mapping the complex filaments of gas and dust in detail and revealing newly formed stars and planets.

In the third image the telescope shows NGC 6744, an archetype of the most star-forming type of galaxy. Euclid’s large field of view covers the entire galaxy revealing details at small spatial scales.

The fourth image shows the galaxy cluster Abell 2764, which includes hundreds of galaxies within a giant patch of dark matter. Also in the foreground is a very bright star located in our own galaxy (V*BP-Phoenicis).

Finally, the Dorado Group of galaxies is shown and the telescope captures evolving and merging galaxies.

It is noted that the Euclid mission is operated by ESA in collaboration with NASA. The Euclid consortium consists of more than 2,000 scientists from 300 institutes in 15 countries in Europe, the USA, Canada and Japan and is responsible for providing the scientific instruments and analyzing the scientific data.