Euclid Telescope Releases Map of 900 Million Galaxies
ESA's first major Euclid data release covers 1900 deg² of sky and 13 months of observations, with 15,000 strong gravitational lens candidates.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has released the first major batch of data from its Euclid space telescope, a mission that cost €1.4bn. The release, called DR1-Foundation, reveals more than 900 million galaxies across 1900 deg² of sky, an area as big as 9500 full Moons, according to Physics World.
The dataset holds 1.7 million GB of data from around 13 months of observations and captures the light of more than a billion objects. It is the largest space-based survey of its kind, ESA’s director of science, Carole Mundell, said.
What the data contains
Besides the galaxies, DR1-Foundation lists 15,000 strong gravitational lens candidates. A strong lens forms when the light of a distant galaxy is significantly distorted by a galaxy in the foreground. Because of that distortion, lenses give astronomers a way to learn about dark matter.
The data also includes more than 60 million quasar candidates. According to the report, they will help researchers understand the first generation of galaxies to exist. These figures are candidates, not confirmed objects, so later analysis may change the counts.
How Euclid takes its measurements
Euclid carries a telescope with a 1.2 m diameter, a camera and a spectrometer. It uses them to plot a 3D map of how galaxies are distributed. Its images are about four times as sharp as those from current ground-based telescopes.
The spacecraft was launched in July 2023 and now sits at Lagrange Point 2, a gravitational balance point some 1.5 million kilometres beyond Earth’s orbit around the Sun. The Euclid Consortium has some 2600 members from more than 15 countries.
What came before
Euclid released its first images in November 2023 and began routine observations in February 2024. Its first science results followed in May 2024. In 2025 the mission put out a first preliminary batch of survey data, which covered a few days of observations over around 60 deg² of sky.
Project scientist Valeria Pettorino said the new release covers more than a year of data over a significantly larger area, and that it “unlocks ground-breaking science.”
What this means for astronomers and what comes next
The release opens a much larger body of observations to researchers around the world than the 2025 preview did. Even so, it covers only about 14% of the total sky area Euclid will survey. The first full data release is set for mid-2027.
Source: Physics World
