Euclid opens data treasure trove, offers glimpse of deep fields

ESA’s Euclid mission releases first survey data

Today, the European Space Agency’s Euclid mission released its first batch of survey data, including a preview of its deep fields. Here, hundreds of thousands of galaxies in different shapes and sizes take centre stage and show a glimpse of their large-scale organisation in the cosmic web.

Covering a huge area of the sky in three mosaics, the data release also includes numerous galaxy clusters, active galactic nuclei and transient phenomena, as well as the first classification survey of more than 380 000 galaxies and 500 gravitational lens candidates compiled through combined artificial intelligence and citizen science efforts. All of this sets the scene for the broad range of topics that the dark Universe detective Euclid is set to address with its rich dataset.

Read the full ESA press release here.

Euclid combines high-resolution imaging with large sky coverage for the first time

“Euclid's unique observational capability could help us to better determine the expansion rate of the Universe through gravitational-wave observations,” explains Miguel Zumalacárregui, deputy lead of Euclid's gravitational waves science working group and group leader in the Astrophysical and Cosmological Relativity department at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in the Potsdam Science Park. To do this, the researchers plan to correlate LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA events with the Euclid galaxy catalogues. Additionally, the large number of gravitational lens systems discovered by Euclid plays an important role. “Euclid observations could also be crucial for detecting the first gravitational waves split into multiple images by gravitational lenses,” adds Zumalacárregui.