Madrid, Mar 19 (EFE).- The European Space Agency’s Euclid space mission has detected 26 million galaxies, some as far away as 10.5 billion light-years, in the first sweep of the three regions of the sky to which it will devote in-depth observations in the coming years.
This figure highlights «the extraordinary resolution of the telescope and the large areas of vision it covers,» Francisco Castander, a researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) and the Institute of Space Studies of Catalonia, told EFE.
The characteristics of the wide-angle space telescope have made it possible to identify 10 times more swept galaxies in a short time than in more than 20 years of observations with the Hubble and James Webb space telescopes.
«It’s impressive how one observation of the deep field areas has already given us a wealth of data that can be used for a variety of purposes in astronomy (…). Just think of the discoveries that await us,» said Valeria Pettorino, Euclid Project Scientist at the European Space Agency (ESA), at a press conference to present the first batch of data mapped by the mission.
Launched in July 2023 to create the most accurate map of the universe to date, the Euclid mission has explored the three contiguous areas of the sky where it will later look more deeply, taking a first look at 63 square degrees, the equivalent of more than 300 times the full moon, the largest area ever observed with a space telescope.
Pettorino said that over the six years of the mission, scientists will observe each of these areas between 30 and 52 times, gradually improving the resolution and expanding the targets to be observed.
The images show hundreds of thousands of galaxies of different shapes, sizes, and luminosities distributed over a large area of the cosmic web.
They are of such impressive depth and detail that they will allow astronomers to familiarize themselves with the data generated by the mission and to program its scientific exploitation beyond the cosmological goals set, said Rafael Toledo, a scientist from the Polytechnic University of Cartagena working on the Euclid mission.
This first batch of data also includes a classification study of more than 380,000 galaxies, grouped according to characteristics such as spiral arms, central bars, and tidal tails.
The catalog was created by the Zoobot artificial intelligence (AI) algorithm, which was trained by 9,976 citizen science contributors to recognize the characteristics of galaxies by classifying images from the Euclid telescope.
This first classification represents only 0.4% of the total number of galaxies at similar resolution that are expected to help scientists answer questions about the formation of spiral arms or the growth of supermassive black holes.
The telescope is expected to capture images of more than 1.5 billion galaxies in its six years of operation, sending about 100 GB (gigabytes) per day, so AI will be key to analyzing and cataloging galaxies.
In addition, AI models have enabled the compilation of 500 gravitational-lens candidates, an object that occurs when a foreground galaxy and its dark matter halo act like a lens, distorting the image of a background galaxy.
Using AI models, Euclid will capture about 7,000 gravitational-lens candidates in the big cosmological data release planned for late 2026 and about 100,000 by the end of the mission, about 100 times more than are currently known.
The mission will also measure the distorted shapes of billions of galaxies over 10 billion years of cosmic history, providing a three-dimensional view of the distribution of dark matter and the expansion of the universe.
The data will also be valuable for a variety of astrophysical studies on smaller scales, from galaxy clusters to planet-sized objects, ESA researchers said.
The Euclid telescope will measure with high precision the enormous variety of shapes and distributions of billions of galaxies thanks to its high-resolution visible imaging instrument, while its near-infrared instrument is essential for unraveling the distances and masses of galaxies. EFE
cam/vm/sc
