First piece of gigantic map of universe revealed

Image source, ESA

Image caption, The new map is MASSIVE but only covers the yellow part, bottom right, of the whole sky

The first section of a 3D map of the universe has been revealed, and it's HUGE.

The vast image is made up of lots of smaller pictures captured by the Euclid telescope, which was launched in 2023 by the European Space Agency (ESA).

They say it shows more than 14 million galaxies and tens of millions of stars.

“And this is just a tiny fraction of the full area that Euclid is going to survey, so by the end we’ll have a real astronomical harvest of discoveries," said Professor Mat Page, of the Mullard space science laboratory.

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Image source, ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA/CEA Paris-Saclay/ JC Cuillandre/E Bertin/G Anselmi/PA Wire

Image caption, This is around 1% of what ESA hope to capture over the six year project.

What makes the map even more impressive is, despite how much it reveals, there is still so more to capture over the six year project.

This image is just 1% of what they hope to produce.

The final image, which is expected to record billions of galaxies, will only show around a third of the sky but will still be the largest 3D map ever made.

Image source, ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA/CEA Paris-Saclay/ JC Cuillandre/E Bertin/G Anselmi/PA Wire

Image caption, The Euclid telescope is able to capture stunningly detailed images of galaxies billions of miles from Earth

To give you an idea of how powerful this telescope is, pictures taken with a top-of-the-range smartphone camera are made up of around 12 million pixels.

This map is 208 gigapixels - by the way, one gigapixel is made up of one billion pixels.

It's big.

But it also means the detail it is able to capture is very impressive.

Image source, ESA/PA Wire

Image caption, The Euclid telescope above Earth embarked on its journey in 2023.

Professor Mat Page, of the Mullard space science laboratory at University College London, said:

“Before Euclid, we would never be able to see the faint cirrus clouds in the Milky Way, and pick out every star that’s illuminating them in super-high resolution."

ESA say in just two weeks, Euclid was able to cover more than 500 times the area of the full Moon as seen from Earth.