CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — Scientists on Tuesday unveiled the first pictures taken by the European space telescope Euclid, a shimmering and stunning collection of galaxies too numerous to count.
The photos were revealed by the European Space Agency, four months after the telescope launched from Cape Canaveral.
Although these celestial landscapes have been observed before by the Hubble Space Telescope and others, Euclid's snapshots provide "razor-sharp astronomical images across such a large patch of the sky, and looking so far into the distant universe," the agency said.
In one picture, Euclid captured a group shot of 1,000 galaxies in a cluster 240 million light-years away, against a backdrop of more than 100,000 galaxies billions of light-years away.
Although the Hubble Space Telescope previously observed the heart of this galaxy, Euclid’s shot reveals star formation across the entire region, scientists said.
Persons:
Euclid, Carole Mundell, Mundell
Organizations:
—, European Space Agency, Hubble, NASA, Euclid, Associated Press Health, Science Department, Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science, Educational Media Group, AP
Locations:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla, Cape Canaveral, Germany, Greece