When the European Space Agency (ESA)’s Euclid telescope launched last year, it was promised to survey a huge chunk of the sky to help understand the mysteries of dark matter. Now, having overcome some icy challenges in its first year of operation, the ESA has released a first look at the great cosmic atlas that Euclid is building.
Built from 260 observations taken over just two weeks in March and April this year, the first chunk of the map is an enormous mosaic of 208 gigapixels. A video zooming in to areas of the mosaic shows just how detailed the images are of the Southern Sky that covers 14 million distant galaxies, plus tens of millions of stars within our own Milky Way:
“This stunning image is the first piece of a map that in six years will reveal more than one third of the sky. This is just 1% of the map, and yet it is full of a variety of sources that will help scientists discover new ways to describe the Universe,” said Valeria Pettorino, Euclid Project Scientist at ESA.
As well as the video, ESA has selected some particularly striking images from the mosaic, zoomed in to between 12 times and 150 times compared to the entire map chunk. These show beautiful spiral galaxies, vast galaxy clusters, and tiny, dim dwarf galaxies as well.
“We have already seen beautiful, high-resolution images of individual objects and groups of objects from Euclid. This new image finally gives us a taste of the enormity of the area of sky Euclid will cover, which will enable us to take detailed measurements of billions of galaxies,” said Jason Rhodes of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).
The next step for the giant cosmic map is a release planned for March 2025, which will include a preview of extremely detailed images of particular areas of scientific interest called the Euclid Deep Fields. So far, the mission has completed 12% of its large-scale survey, so there will be lots more stunning data to come from this telescope.
“What really strikes me about these new images is the tremendous range in physical scale,” said JPL’s Mike Seiffert. “The images capture detail from clusters of stars near an individual galaxy to some of the largest structures in the universe. We are beginning to see the first hints of what the full Euclid data will look like when it reaches the completion of the prime survey.”
After 13 suborbital test flights and more than $15 billion in development costs, SpaceX's Starship has finally reached orbit. The 407-foot megarocket, the most powerful ever built, lifted off from Starbase, Texas, on Monday and delivered its first real payload on it's 14th attempt. The celebration came with an asterisk, though, since SpaceX had to cut the planned 10-hour mission to roughly three hours.
https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/2104601695711904180
SpaceX is finally ready to give Starship its biggest test yet. The company says the massive rocket's 14th test flight is scheduled for September 22, when it will attempt to put the upper stage into Earth orbit for the first time. The launch is currently pending regulatory approval, with a 75-minute window opening at 7:15 a.m. CT.
Starship has 26 Starlink satellites to deliver
For decades, humanity has looked up at the Moon and wondered what it would be like to live on it. Think sprawling cities, factories, research centers, and permanent human settlements. Unfortunately, there is one fairly fundamental problem with that vision.
A new study published in Frontiers in Space Technologies argues that even the Moon's potentially enormous reserves of frozen water may be nowhere near enough to support city-sized populations sustainably. Researchers Martin Elvis and Jonathan McDowell estimate that the permanently shadowed regions near the lunar poles could contain roughly one billion tons of water. It sounds like an extraordinary amount until you put a million thirsty humans next to it.