Overview

• ESA's Euclid space telescope has released its first images, showing a level of detail that surpasses expectations and reveals previously unseen features in known areas of the nearby universe.
• The telescope's mission is to photograph large portions of the sky to construct the largest 3D cosmic map ever made, with the third dimension being time.
• Unlike other telescopes that primarily go deep, Euclid aims to cover a breadth of the night sky, intending to image one-third of it over a span of six years.
• By looking at a large-scale cosmic structure and peering back into time, the mission hopes to study the effects of dark matter and dark energy on cosmic evolution.
• While we cannot directly image dark matter or dark energy, through this large-scale examination and by observing billions of galaxies and their evolution over time, Euclid will help astronomers understand these dark mysteries that make up 95 percent of the universe.