Galactic sea photographed by the Euclidean Space Telescope
ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, J.-C. Image processing by Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi
The extraordinary image from the Euclidean Space Telescope has acquired 26 million galaxies.
Euclid was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in July 2023, and in November of that year it sent its first image back. The six-year mission will image about a third of the sky and build the most detailed 3D map of Cosmos ever created. Once completed, this investigation will help to lighten how dark matter and dark energy behave on a cosmic scale.
ESA is currently being released The first large data on this missionstarts with three “deep fields.” This is an area where the telescope becomes a more detailed peer than the rest of the study area. These three spots represent 63 squares of sky, which corresponds to an area where the full moon is covered 300 times. Over the next few years, Euclide will pass these regions 30-52 times to build more detailed images.
It’ll be Percival The University of Waterloo in Canada says that current batches of images are less than 50% of what gathers on missions, but there is already plenty of researchers to collaborate with. “There’s so much you can do about many individual galaxies and their properties because it’s not something that’s done in space-based research with nearby infrared light or optics like this,” he says. “It’s not exactly the same quality as HST [the Hubble Space Telescope]but it’s so close that it doesn’t just point to individual objects and shoot. We are conducting an investigation. ”
Researchers have already used Euclidean data to find hundreds of powerful gravity lenses. These phenomena are formed when the gravity of an object in the foreground distorts light from a distant galaxy, creating an arc shape or a complete ring. Previously, scientists had to hunt these individually, point them to the HST, and collect more images. Currently, astronomers can search for survey data from Euclidean and find more at once. This helps to gather insights into the evolution of galaxies and the universe.
Using AI models, researchers were able to find and catalog 500 galaxies with powerful gravity lenses with this first data alone, doubling the total seen to date. “The statistics are incredible,” Percival says. “Euclidean will ultimately get this amount of data 200 times.”
The data released so far represents only one week of images from Euclidean, but up to 35 terabytes. This is equivalent to 200 days of high quality video streaming. The next batch of data is expected to be released later next year, and will be a year’s worth of images covering 2,000 square degrees and over 2,000 terabytes of storage space.
It can take over 100 years to view each galaxy manually, so AI is used to dramatically speed up the process, he says. Mike Walmsley At the University of Toronto. “We can ask new questions in weeks, not years, but in weeks,” he says.
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