gaitee

Today, I presented to @ESA Member States the first data from ESA's Euclid mission. This dataset includes 26 million galaxies, including a catalogue of more than 380 000 galaxies of which Euclid measured the shapes and the first catalogue of 500 galaxy-galaxy strong lenses, created using AI algorithms trained thanks to the collective effort of almost 10 000 human volunteers. Euclid scouted out three big areas in the sky, the Euclid Deep Fields, amounting to 63 square degrees of the sky, the equivalent area of more than 300 times the full Moon. In just one week of observations, with one scan of each region so far, Euclid already spotted 26 million galaxies. The farthest of those are up to 10.5 billion light-years away. In these regions, we start to hint at the large-scale organisation of these galaxies in the cosmic web. Zooming in some areas of this Euclid Deep Fields we encounter huge galaxy clusters with a sea of galaxies of many different shapes and sizes, oriented in all directions and many with spiral arms visible. In some of them, we “see” how the Dark Matter within the clusters distorts the light of faraway galaxies, forming arc-like smears. Euclid: a truly European mission, built and operated by ESA, with many contributions from its Member States and international partners. The Euclid Consortium consists of more than 2000 scientists from 300 institutes in 15 European countries, the USA, Canada and Japan. Good and just science is done alongside international cooperation, and this must stay at the core of our space activities. And as Head of Council Renato @krpoun said today after seeing the images, "well I guess this really puts things into perspective". Dive deep into the Universe here: youtube.com/watch?v=rXCBFlIp… And read more about the results here: esa.int/Science_Exploration/…