Telescope snaps most detailed photo yet of Milky Way's heart
Summary
The Euclid space telescope has taken the largest and most detailed photo of the center of the Milky Way galaxy, showing 60 million stars. This photo will help scientists study known planets outside our Solar System and find new details about them using a method called microlensing.Key Facts
- The photo shows the bright, crowded center of the Milky Way, called the bulge, which contains billions of stars.
- Euclid is a space telescope launched in 2023 to study one-third of the sky and understand dark matter and dark energy.
- The telescope captured the image from a point about 930,000 miles from Earth using a visible light camera over 26 hours in March 2025.
- The black-and-white image was colorized using data from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii.
- Microlensing occurs when the gravity of a closer star bends and brightens the light of a background star, allowing scientists to detect planets orbiting the closer star.
- Euclid's image includes 51 known planetary systems and will help study many more planets found in the future.
- Euclid is stationed about a million miles from Earth beyond the moon and will observe galaxies and galaxy clusters up to 10 billion years old during its six-year mission.
- The telescope has previously captured detailed photos of distant galaxy clusters, helping scientists learn more about the universe.
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