Astrology

Euclid releases its first major survey of more than 900 million galaxies

The European Space Agency's Euclid telescope has released its first major survey data, including more than 900 million galaxies, Yahoo Tech reports. The collection gives scientists material to begin building a detailed three-dimensional map of the universe.

Named DR1-Foundation, the release includes more than a billion cosmic objects in a catalog based on about 13 months of observations. It is the mission's first major data release since Euclid launched in mid-2023.

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Euclid's survey spans a wider sky#

The Euclid Wide Survey data covers 1,900 square degrees of sky and amounts to 1.7 million gigabytes. The release also includes images, large sky mosaics and spectra, or light signatures, from more than 160 million sources.

Earlier Euclid releases drew on a few days of observations across about 60 square degrees, project scientist Valeria Pettorino said. The new collection covers a much larger area and more than a year of observations.

Euclid can survey deeply and widely from above Earth's atmosphere, which blurs and dims images taken from the ground. The release also includes more than 60 million candidates for quasars, the bright cores of distant galaxies.

Lenses offer clues to invisible matter#

The data contains around 15,000 candidates for strong gravitational lenses. These form when a foreground galaxy greatly distorts light from a more distant one. Yahoo Tech reports that the resulting catalog is larger than all earlier catalogs of such lenses combined.

According to Natalie Lines of the University of Portsmouth, astronomers can use strong lensing to gauge each galaxy's mass, including its unseen dark matter, and investigate the universe's expansion. The candidates in the release give researchers a large collection to examine.

Dark matter accounts for roughly 27% of the universe, while dark energy makes up about 68%, according to Phys.org. Dark matter cannot be seen directly, but its gravity helps hold cosmic structures together. Dark energy appears to drive the universe's accelerating expansion.

More Euclid analysis is scheduled#

The release represents about 14% of the sky area planned for Euclid's six-year survey, according to Yahoo. The telescope's observations include some galaxies that existed when the universe was 700 million years old, Phys.org reports.

Further analysis products, including catalogs for weak lensing and measurements of galaxy clustering, need additional validation and are scheduled for the complete data release in mid-2027, Tech Times reports.

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