Dark matter telescope captures a bright galaxy merger
Euclid Space Telescope is decorating the hall with branches of stars
ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing: Euclid Science Ground Segment and M. Schirmer (MPIA) (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO,
A stunning new image from the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope shows a faint spiral galaxy wrapped in deep space.
Euclid was launched in 2023 on a six-year mission to map the universe on a large scale, observing billions of galaxies extending up to 10 billion light years from Earth. The effort could explain how galaxies form and evolve and how the universe has expanded over its 13.8 billion or so year history.
In turn, astronomers hope Euclid will shed light on dark matter, which we know stretches ordinary matter but is completely invisible to us, and dark energy, the force responsible for accelerating the pace of the universe’s expansion.
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The effort will begin in earnest next year, when Euclid releases its first formal batch of data, covering about 14 percent of its final survey area.
Until then, the Euclid team has offered occasional teasers of the telescope’s power, including a festive new image of the galaxy NGC 646. This beautiful spiral galaxy, filled with stars, is about 392 million light years from Earth – about 4 percent of the distance to Euclid’s most distant targets – and is receding at a speed of more than 5,000 miles per second.
There is a second galaxy visible at the left edge of NGC 646, known as PGC 6014 – but their apparent proximity is merely an optical illusion; The truth is that PGC 6014 is about 45 million light years closer to Earth.
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