Scientists from our Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy and our Institute for Computational Cosmology are playing a crucial role as part of a major international space mission to map the Universe.
We are a key partner of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid space telescope, which is on a six-year mission to create the largest cosmic 3D map of the dark Universe ever made.
The Euclid Consortium (EC) has released a series of scientific papers and exclusive data based on observations made by the Euclid space telescope.
Unprecedented power
Since arriving at its destination 1.5 million kilometres away from Earth in February 2024, the Euclid space telescope has been imaging large areas of deep space with unprecedented resolution.
The main scientific goals of Euclid are to help us understand the nature of dark matter, dark energy and testing Einstein's theory of gravity.
As part of this latest release, three different fields have been observed and analysed by scientists to provide the first dataset that will be imaged by the space telescope by the end of the survey.
These new images and insights demonstrate the unprecedented power of the telescope designed to provide the most precise map of our Universe over time.
Cutting edge astrophysics
Like all sensitive electronics, the Euclid telescope gradually degrades above the protection of the Earth's atmosphere causing the images to become blurred.
Our scientists monitor for any radiation damage caused to the telescope and has developed the postprocessing software to de-blur the images in an accurate way.
Professor Richard Massey, from our Centre for Extragalactic Astronomy, is a founder of the Euclid mission and has been developing its design and science goals for 20 years.
Our astrophysicists Dr Maximilian von Wietersheim-Kramsta and Dr Gavin Leroy are leading Euclid's radiation monitoring and correction.
Their research is pivotal for providing the main cosmological analysis of the gravitational lensing, how galaxies bend light, using supercomputer simulations and advanced statistical methods.
Euclid opens the golden age of gravitational lensing studies - when observations and images of background galaxies are distorted by the dark matter distribution in the foreground before arriving to us. The Q1 data release only brings 0.4% of the complete study area, but the data is already proving to be a goldmine for UK scientists, revealing some of the rarest phenomena. These observations are a treasure trove that needs to be protected from the Sun's damage. Being in space far away from us, the telescope is continuously under the attack of cosmic rays and radiation. Our research is crucial to correcting the damage on the images using cutting-edge statistical techniques.
These observations are tremendously exciting: they demonstrate the capabilities of this precision instrument, while already pushing the cutting-edge in astrophysics. Among the results, it is astonishing that Euclid has already discovered 500 gravitational lens candidates substantially adding to the total of approximately 1,000 previously known lensed galaxies, which took over 40 years to discover! At this rate, Euclid is expected to observe 200,000 such objects over six years of the survey. These observations, together with the two billion galaxies Euclid will image, will help us understand how dark matter is distributed in the Universe and may allow us to uncover its nature.
Key milestones for Euclid
The new data provides a first glimpse of Euclid's cosmological survey and covers the largest contiguous areas of sky ever observed with an optical/near-infrared space telescope.
In October 2024, the consortium released images of the first chunk of the map - a huge mosaic of more than 200,000 megapixels, containing 14 million galaxies.
The next data release will include Euclid's nominal survey and core-science observations, including results about the nature of dark energy.
The mission's first year of cosmology data will be released in 2026.
