27/06/2026 12:54 - Tecnologia
The European Space Agency (ESA) has achieved what once seemed impossible: photographing the center of our home galaxy with unprecedented detail. The Euclid Space Telescope, originally designed to study dark matter and dark energy, has proven far more versatile than anticipated.
The result is the most complete star catalog in history of the galactic center—a region that concentrates an enormous amount of stars and has been the dream of astronomers for decades.
The final mosaic reveals with astonishing clarity tens of millions of stars, plus nebulae and star clusters that previously could only be seen as blurry shapes.
What Euclid accomplished in one day and two hours would have taken more than 2,000 hours using ground-based telescopes like the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
Euclid captured 9 independent photographs of sky regions larger than a full Moon each. These images were then combined into a perfectly calibrated mosaic, revealing details impossible for conventional instruments.
The key advantage: Euclid operates from space, without atmospheric interference that distorts and blurs astronomical images taken from Earth.
The image is not just an aesthetic achievement. It serves a concrete scientific purpose: detecting gravitational microlensing—a phenomenon occurring when two stars align before the telescope, and the gravity of the closer star acts like a magnifying glass, bending light from the star behind it.
How does it work? If the closer star has an orbiting planet, its gravity produces an asymmetric distortion in the light that allows detection of that extrasolar world. This method has already enabled the discovery of 300 exoplanets, but now with Euclid and NASA's future Nancy Grace Roman telescope, precision will be exponentially greater.
An exoplanet is any planet orbiting a star outside our Solar System. The Milky Way contains hundreds of billions of stars, and most likely have planets. Finding them helps answer one of humanity's greatest questions: Are we alone in the universe?
Euclid doesn't work alone. Astronomers are combining its data with information from the Hubble Space Telescope and the Keck Observatory in Hawaii. This collaboration has already enabled calculating the mass of two previously discovered icy exoplanets.
The catalog will serve as a starting point for NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Telescope, which will be able to compare images of the same sky region to detect temporal variations in microlenses, allowing not only discovery of new planets but also calculation of their mass and movement.
Euclid is an ESA mission launched in July 2023 with the primary goal of studying dark matter and dark energy—components that constitute approximately 95% of the cosmos yet remain mysterious. Its ability to photograph vast sky areas with exceptional sharpness makes it an invaluable tool for multiple astronomical discoveries.
Source: Xataka
Alfredo S. Quiroga
