Euclid Telescope Reveals First Chunk Of Gargantuan 208-Gigapixel Map Of The Universe
The Euclid space telescope has been busy since its launch, capturing celestial objects such as rogue planets not tethered to a star, to capturing its first look at the dark Universe. In just two weeks, Euclid was able to cover 132 square degrees of the Southern Sky in what the ESA calls “pristine detail,” or more than 500 times the area of the full Moon.
“This stunning image is the first piece of a map that in six years will reveal more than one third of the sky. This is just 1% of the map, and yet it is full of a variety of sources that will help scientists discover new ways to describe the Universe,” explained Valeria Pettorino, Euclid Project Scientist at ESA.
According to the ESA, the first piece of the map already contains around 100 million sources such as stars in the Milky Way, and galaxies beyond. Euclid’s sensitive cameras have captured an enormous amount of objects so far, while still being able to zoom in very deep into the mosaic to make out the intricate structure of a spiral galaxy.
In the image below, the area shown is zoomed in 150 times compared to the large mosaic. On the left of the image, Euclid captured two galaxies interacting with one another, 420-million light-years from Earth. On the right side, galaxy cluster Abell 3381 is visible, and is located about 678 million-light-years from Earth.
The mosaic released recently is only a sneak peek at a small portion of what’s to come. Since the mission began its routine science observations in February, 12% of the survey has been completed. There are around 100GB of images and spectra being sent to Earth every day, with the ESA setting up a European network of nine data centers, over 7,000 processors (which will handle about 10% of the data), a team of six scientists and IT specialists to try to handle the incredibly large amount of data.
“The constantly changing software and hardware presents our team with major challenges to assure the timely processing,” remarked Maximilian Fabricius (LMU and MPE), head of the SDC-DE. “However, we are proud of how well everything is now coming together and that we are now on track for processing for the first public data release.”
With only a very small portion of data having been collected by the Euclid mission thus far, there is still so much to look forward to. Stay tuned to HotHardware for future updates concerning the Euclid mission.
