Euclid telescope creates most detailed image of the center of the Milky Way

The Euclid telescope, launched by the European Space Agency, has created the most detailed image to date of the center of the Milky Way galaxy, Earth.uz reported.

This vast mosaic, compiled from 26 hours of observations, contains more than 60 million stars. The discovery is not only an astronomical image but also serves as a foundational map for future searches for exoplanets.

Thanks to its wide field of view, the Euclid telescope accomplishes this complex task in record time. For comparison, the Keck Observatory in Hawaii—one of the most powerful ground-based observatories—would need to spend nearly 2,000 hours to capture an image of similar depth.

Euclid completes the task in just over a day and covers an area 270 times larger than Hubble in a single shot. The resulting image holds revolutionary significance for discovering new planets using the gravitational microlensing technique.

This method relies on the brightening of light from a distant star due to the gravitational influence of another star in the foreground. If a planet orbits the foreground star, it leaves a distinctive signature on the light signal.

Of the nearly 300 exoplanets discovered in the last 20 years, almost all were found in the direction of the galactic center. As astronomer Jan-Filipp Byolye of the Paris Institute of Astrophysics emphasizes, such observations require regions where stars are densely packed.

The mosaic produced by Euclid already contains 51 known planetary systems. This map will serve as a preparatory task for NASA’s upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission.

A key feature of the new map is that it records the motion and initial state of stars. In the future, when the Nancy Grace Roman Telescope detects a microlensing event, scientists will be able to use Euclid’s data to precisely calculate the mass and position of planets within their systems.

Unlike traditional methods, microlensing is not limited to hot, large planets. It enables the detection of cold planets in wide orbits beyond our Solar System.

Scientists estimate that nearly every star in the Milky Way may host at least one such planet. Currently, data on cold exoplanets like OGLE-2005-BLG-390Lb—located in Euclid’s field of view—and bodies in binary star systems are being reanalyzed.

According to project leader Valeriya Petterino, the high-resolution images captured by the telescope will, over time, become invaluable for studying stellar motion, the structure of interstellar clouds, and galactic dynamics.