ISLAMABAD — The European Space Agency has released its first big collection of data from the orbiting Euclid telescope’s mission to map the universe’s large-scale structure, including observations of more than 900 million galaxies, as scientists investigate the puzzling cosmic components dark matter and dark energy. The data unveiled on Thursday covered a survey of the sky equal to about 9,500 times the size of the moon as viewed from Earth.
The mission’s goal is to complete the largest-ever three-dimensional atlas of the cosmos, spanning more than a third of the sky, in 2031. Thursday’s release encompassed around 13 months of Euclid observations, totalling an enormous 1.7 petabytes 1.7 million gigabytes of data. “It marks a major milestone for ESA’s Euclid mission and for everyone involved,” said astrophysicist Valeria Pettorino, ESA’s Euclid project scientist.
Euclid, launched from Florida in 2023, is gathering data on how the universe has expanded and how its structure has formed over time while amassing information about the nature of dark energy and dark matter and the role of gravity on large scales. “Euclid will not just take images of galaxies in the sky, in two dimensions, but will also measure their distance, the third dimension. This will tell us where galaxies are in space and time, across 10 billion years, and in all directions beyond our galactic plane,” Pettorino said.