Euclid space telescope captures 26 million galaxies in first data drop

The European Space Agency has released the first batch of large-scale images from the Euclid space telescope, which astronomers have already used to find hundreds of strong gravitational lenses

By Matthew Sparkes

19 March 2025

A sea of galaxies photographed by the Euclid space telescope

ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi

Extraordinary images from the Euclid space telescope have captured 26 million galaxies, some as far off as 10.5 billion light years.

Euclid was launched by the European Space Agency (ESA) in July 2023 and sent back its first images in November that year. During a six-year mission, it will image about one-third of the sky, building the most detailed 3D map of the cosmos ever created. Once complete, this survey will help to illuminate how dark matter and dark energy behave on cosmic scales.

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ESA has now released the first large-scale data from this mission, beginning with three “deep fields” – areas where the telescope will peer in more detail than in the rest of its survey area. These three spots represent just 63 square degrees of sky, an area equivalent to that covered by the full moon 300 times over. In the coming years, Euclid will pass over these regions between 30 and 52 times, building up an ever more detailed image.

Will Percival at the University of Waterloo in Canada says the current batch of images is less than half a per cent of what Euclid will gather over the mission, but there is already plenty for researchers to work with. “For a lot of individual galaxies and their properties, there’s so much science you can do, and that’s because nobody has done a space-based survey in the near infrared and the optical like this before,” he says. “It’s not quite the same quality as HST [the Hubble Space Telescope], but it’s very close, and we’re not just pointing and shooting at individual objects – we’re doing a survey.”