Pioneering spacecraft's first images will leave you starstruck

There's a new spacecraft in town.

The European Space Agency's Euclid probe — launched in 2023 and packing a high-resolution 1.2-meter (four-foot) wide telescope — is designed to capture "razor-sharp" views of the cosmos, and the craft just beamed back its first images. They teem with brilliant stars and galaxies.

"We have never seen astronomical images like this before, containing so much detail. They are even more beautiful and sharp than we could have hoped for, showing us many previously unseen features in well-known areas of the nearby universe," René Laureijs, ESA’s Euclid project scientist, said in a statement. "Now we are ready to observe billions of galaxies, and study their evolution over cosmic time."

The Euclid images are highly detailed because the mission's scientists are investigating a profoundly elusive, though omnipresent, target: dark matter. Astronomers know dark matter exists, because it gravitationally influences the objects we can see, but they don't know what it is. "This might be a surprise, but we don’t know what most of the universe is made of. Seriously, we don’t," NASA explains.

Astronomers suspect that a whopping 95 percent of the universe is dark matter and energy. To better grasp it, cosmic researchers need to observe the precise "shapes, distances, and motions of billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years," the ESA explains.

These first images, showing a diversity of galaxies and cosmic objects, prove the craft can capture these detailed cosmic views.

"This incredible snapshot from Euclid is a revolution for astronomy," writes the ESA. "The image shows 1,000 galaxies belonging to the Perseus Cluster, and more than 100,000 additional galaxies further away in the background, each containing up to hundreds of billions of stars." Credit: ESA / Euclid / Euclid Consortium / NASA // Image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay) / G. Anselmi / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The Horsehead Nebula, an expansive, star-forming cloud of dust and gas some 1,375 light-years away from Earth. Credit: ESA / Euclid / Euclid Consortium / NASA // Image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay) / G. Anselmi / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Galaxy IC 342, or Caldwell 5, is often obscured by the stars and matter in our Milky Way galaxy. "Euclid could take this beautiful and sharp image thanks to its incredible sensitivity and superb optics," the ESA explained. "Most important here is that Euclid used its near-infrared instrument to peer through the dust and measure the light from the many cool and low-mass stars that dominate the galaxy's mass." Credit: ESA / Euclid / Euclid Consortium / NASA // Image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay) / G. Anselmi / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The dense stars clustered in the irregular galaxy NGC 6822, which is cosmically close to Earth at some 1.6 million light-years away. Credit: ESA / Euclid / Euclid Consortium / NASA // Image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay) / G. Anselmi / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

Hundreds of thousands of stars, held together by gravity, in the globular cluster called NGC 6397. Credit: ESA / Euclid / Euclid Consortium / NASA // Image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay) / G. Anselmi / CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO

The Euclid craft orbits the sun about 1 million miles from Earth, similar to the James Webb Space Telescope, a mission investigating some of the earliest galaxies in the universe, curious exoplanets (planets beyond our solar system), and even objects close to Earth.

Now that Euclid is capturing exceptional images of the cosmos, the real mission begins.

"In the coming months, scientists in the Euclid Consortium will analyse these images and publish a series of scientific papers in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, together with papers about the scientific objectives of the Euclid mission and the instrument performance," Yannick Mellier, an astrophysicist working on the mission, said in a statement.