Euclid Unveils Stunning First Full-Color Peek Into the Dark Universe

The telescope was launched into space in July and despite some teething issues, it is now ready to reveal just how revolutionary it will be as an instrument. The Euclid Consortium has selected five images that show off the potential that this dark universe observatory has.

This square astronomical image shows thousands of galaxies across the black expanse of space. The closest thousand or so galaxies belong to the Perseus Cluster. The most prominent members of the cluster are visible in the centre of the image and appear as large galaxies with haloes around them in yellow/white, comparable to streetlamps in a foggy night. The background of this image is scattered with a hundred thousand more distant galaxies of different shapes, ranging in colour from white to yellow to red. Most galaxies are so far away they appear as single points of light. The more distant a galaxy is, the redder it appears.

Unsurprisingly, the first image released is a cluster of galaxies, the bread and butter of what will be Euclid’s scientific focus. The Perseus cluster is one of the most massive known groups of galaxies with about 1,000 members located roughly 240 million light-years away. It is also the object that produces the lowest note in the universe. This image not only shows all those galaxies but it also shows 100,000 more stretching out to 10 billion light-years away. Many of those faint distant galaxies are completely new to science.

Euclid observes the universe in visible light and infrared, bringing a level of detail and clarity in a single observation that is unprecedented. The view of spiral galaxy IC 342 or local irregular galaxy NGC 6822 shows just how sharp its eye on the sky really is.