A nearby and familiar nebula, never-before-seen galaxies 10 billion light-years away: the first images from Europe’s Euclid space telescope, released on Tuesday, showed a variety of objects across the universe.
• Also read: Remains of a star: ‘Bones of a ghostly cosmic hand’ revealed by NASA
Here’s a panorama of these five stunning images, which, according to astronomer Jean-Charles Cuillandre, a member of the Euclid Consortium, show a “range of ‘galactic zoo’ objects in terms of diversity, colors and shapes.”
Horsehead Nebula
AFP
The image resembles a giant red horse standing amid a swirl of stars, some of which are still forming: the Horsehead Nebula has never been shown in such complete detail.
This nebula – a nursery of stars – also known as Barnard 33, is located in the famous constellation Orion.
It is one of the star-forming regions closest to our solar system, just 1,375 light-years away. The horse’s head is actually a dark cloud against a background of ultraviolet radiation coming from the star Sigma Orionis, one of the brightest in the Orion constellation.
Euclid could make it possible to discover planets the size of Jupiter as well as forming stars.
The globular cluster NGC 6397
AFP
A little further from Earth (7,800 light-years away, but still in our galaxy), this star cluster brings together several hundred thousand stars clumped together by gravity. Euclid is the first telescope capable of “observing the cluster in its entirety while distinguishing its less luminous stars at its periphery,” explains Davide Massari of the Italian National Institute of Astrophysics in a press release.
AFP
Scientists hope to use Euclid to discover the stars that follow these globular clusters as they travel through our galaxy. But surprise: As expected, the probe did not discover any stars following the star cluster NGC 6397, notes René Laureijs, scientific director of the project at ESA. One explanation is that these stars are held together by the gravitational pull of dark matter in the star cluster.
For the scientist, it could therefore be “indirect evidence” of the existence of this invisible component of the universe, a mystery of astronomy that Euclid wants to solve.
An irregular galaxy
AFP
Not all galaxies have clearly defined spiral structures like the Milky Way. This is the case of the irregular-shaped dwarf galaxy NGC 6822, which Euclid captured completely for the first time in less than an hour.
“It’s not huge, a few tens of millions of stars,” describes Jean-Charles Cuillandre, astronomer and physicist at the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). It is 1.6 million light-years away, but still close to our galaxy.
AFP
Its stars have low “metallicity,” meaning they are poor in elements, like those of the early universe. By studying their composition, astronomers hope to better understand how galaxies evolved.
A “Hidden Galaxy”
AFP
IC 342, also called “the hidden galaxy,” is difficult to observe, not because of its distance of about 11 million light-years, but because it is hidden behind the disk of our Milky Way. The Euclid infrared instrument, built with NASA, manages to penetrate the clouds of cosmic dust to distinguish its stars and measure their light.
AFP
Perseus Cluster and 100,000 other galaxies
According to ESA, this image is a “revolution for astronomy”: in a single image, Euclid captured the landscape of a thousand galaxies that make up the Perseus cluster, about 240 million light-years away. Earth. And, above all, in the background there are more than 100,000 other, much more distant galaxies, whose light from the most distant one took 10 billion years to reach the telescope.
AFP
For René Laureijs and his team, this is the “most exciting” picture. For the first time, they saw low-intensity light that did not come from the galaxy cluster, but from stars left behind by collisions between galaxies: According to astronomers’ calculations, such a galaxy cluster could only have been formed thanks to dark matter.
By capturing the light that took 10 billion years to reach Earth’s environment, Euclid also hopes to better understand how dark energy has fueled the expansion of the universe since the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.