Perseus Galaxy Cluster from Euclid
Image Credit &
License:
ESA,
Euclid,
Euclid Consortium,
NASA;
Processing:
Jean-Charles Cuillandre
(CEA Paris-Saclay) &
Giovanni Anselmi;
Text: Jean-Charles Cuillandre
There's a new space telescope in the sky:
Euclid.
Equipped with two large panoramic cameras,
Euclid captures light from the
visible to the near-infrared.
It took five hours of observing for
Euclid's 1.2-meter diameter primary mirror
to capture, through its
sharp optics,
the 1000+ galaxies in the
Perseus cluster, which lies 250 million
light years away.
More than 100,000 galaxies are visible in the background,
some as
far away as 10 billion light years.
The revolutionary nature of
Euclid
lies in the combination of its wide
field of view (twice the area of the full moon),
its high angular resolution
(thanks to its 620 Megapixel camera), and its infrared vision,
which captures both images and
spectra.
Euclid's initial surveys, covering a third of the sky and recording over
2 billion galaxies, will enable a
study of how
dark matter
and
dark energy have shaped
our universe.