See the incredible first images taken by the dark matter-hunting Euclid telescope

The recently-launched Euclid space telescope just took some of its first images, and the European Space Agency (ESA) has shared them to give a taste of what is to come from this dark matter investigation tool.

Even though they are only preliminary test images, they still give a stunning view of distant galaxies and show what Euclid will be able to produce once it begins its science operations in a few months’ time. The aim of the mission is to learn about dark matter and dark energy by creating a 3D map of the dark matter in the universe.

An image of space taken during the commissioning of Euclid to check that the focused instrument worked as expected. — Euclid’s Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) instrument is dedicated to measuring the amount of light that galaxies emit at each wavelength. It will image the sky in infrared light (900–2000 nm) to measuring the brightness and intensity of light. This image was taken during commissioning of Euclid to check that the focused instrument worked as expected. This is a raw image taken using NISP’s ‘Y’ filter. Because it is largely unprocessed, some unwanted artefacts remain – for example the cosmic rays that shoot straight across, seen especially in the VIS image. The Euclid Consortium will ultimately turn the longer-exposed survey observations into science-ready images that are artefact-free, more detailed, and razor-sharp. ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The first image was taken using Euclid’s Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) instrument as part of the commissioning process. It shows some tweaks that still need to be made to the final processed images, such as removing artifacts caused by cosmic rays (the straight lines which look like scratches on the image). This was also taken with a short exposure of just 100 seconds, compared to the 500+ seconds that will be used for science images, making them sharper and more detailed. But this was already enough to show features like spiral galaxies, nearby stars, and star clusters.

The image on the left shows the full NISP field of view, with the zoom-in on the right (4% of NISP’s full field of view). — The image on the left shows the full NISP field of view, with the zoom-in on the right (4% of NISP’s full field of view) demonstrating the extraordinary level of detail that NISP is already achieving. We see spiral and elliptical galaxies, nearby and distant stars, star clusters, and much more. But the area of sky that it covers is actually only about a quarter of the width and height of the full Moon. ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

To give you an idea of how detailed these images are, the image at the top is just one small part of the huge field of view of the NISP instrument. Above you can see how this image was cropped from the total NISP test image, showing just 4% of its total field of view.

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“After more than 11 years of designing and developing Euclid, it’s exhilarating and enormously emotional to see these first images,” says Euclid project manager Giuseppe Racca in a statement. “It’s even more incredible when we think that we see just a few galaxies here, produced with minimum system tuning. The fully calibrated Euclid will ultimately observe billions of galaxies to create the biggest ever 3D map of the sky.”

As well as NISP, Euclid has another instrument called the VISible instrument (VIS) which will look in the visible light range, unlike NISP which takes images in the infrared. Once again, this image is just a small crop of the total field of view.

This first VIS image taken by Euclid shows spiral and elliptical galaxies, distant stars, and star clusters. — This first VIS image is already full of detail; we see spiral and elliptical galaxies, nearby and distant stars, star clusters, and much more. But the area of sky that it covers is actually only about a quarter of the width and height of the full Moon. Euclid’s telescope collected light for 566 seconds to enable VIS to create this image. ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

“I’m thrilled by the beauty of these images and the abundance of information contained within them,” said Mark Cropper from University College London, leader of the development of VIS. “I’m so proud of what the VIS team has achieved and grateful to all of those who have enabled this capability. VIS images will be available for all to use, whether for scientific or other purposes. They will belong to everybody.”