Dark Matter Telescope Captures Brilliant Galactic Merger
The Euclid Space Telescope decorates the halls with branches of starlight
ESA/Euclid/Euclidean Consortium/NASA, image processing: Euclid Science Ground Segment and M. Schirmer (MPIA) (CC BY-SA 3.0 MPO)
A heavy spiral galaxy appears draped against the backdrop of deep space in a stunning new image from the European Space Agency. Euclid telescope.
Euclid launched a six-year mission in 2023 to map the cosmos at scale, observing billions of galaxies extending up to 10 billion light-years from Earth. The effort could reveal how galaxies form and evolve, and how the universe has expanded over its history of about 13.8 billion years.
In turn, astronomers hope that Euclid will shed light on dark matterwhich, as we know, pulls normal matter with it, but is completely invisible to us, and dark energythe force that is responsible for accelerating the rate of expansion of the Universe.
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Those efforts will begin in earnest next year, when Euclid releases its first official batch of data, which will account for about 14 percent of its final survey area.
Until then, Euclid's team had proposed random telescope power teaserincluding a new holiday image of the galaxy NGC 646. This elegant, star-filled spiral galaxy is about 392 million light-years from Earth—about 4 percent of the distance from Euclid's farthest targets—and receding at speeds of more than 5,000 miles per second.
A second galaxy known as PGC 6014 appears on the left edge of NGC 646, but their apparent proximity is merely an optical illusion; in fact, PGC 6014 is almost 45 million light years closer to Earth.
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