Overview
- The European Space Agency published a first large Euclid data release that contains imaging of over 900 million galaxies collected across about 14% of the planned survey area.
- The release covers roughly 1.7 petabytes of observations from 13 months of operations and images a sky area equivalent to about 9,500 full Moons.
- Catalogs in the dataset include about 15,000 strong gravitational lens candidates and roughly 60 million quasar candidates, both of which are powerful tools to weigh galaxies and study the early universe.
- Spectra for about 160 million sources in the release give distance estimates needed to place objects in three dimensions and begin reconstructing the cosmic web that traces dark matter.
- Euclid’s team says this batch is the foundation for deeper analyses and that larger releases and the first formal constraints on dark energy and dark matter are expected as the survey continues toward its >1/3‑sky goal by 2031.