Euclid Telescope Captures Image of 60 Million Stars in Milky Way Center

The European Space Agency's Euclid probe captured an image showing more than 60 million individual stars in the Milky Way's central bulge. The telescope recorded the data during 26 hours of observation in March of the previous year. The resulting mosaic combines nine separate pointings from the spacecraft's visible-light camera.

Each pointing covers an area larger than the apparent size of the full moon.

Euclid launched in 2023 with a primary mission to build a three-dimensional map of the universe. The €1 billion instrument was not originally designed for exoplanet detection. An astrophysicist at the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics said the telescope has proven effective for this work despite its original purpose.

Detection of distant planets will use microlensing, in which a nearer star's gravity bends light from a more distant star. A planet orbiting the nearer star produces an additional brightening spike. The Euclid data will provide precise stellar positions before overlaps occur, allowing calculation of movement speeds.

The same astrophysicist said the image could improve those measurements by up to a factor of three. NASA plans to launch the Nancy Grace Roman space telescope in August. Researchers expect that mission to identify about 1,500 exoplanets through microlensing and roughly 100,000 additional worlds through transit observations.