Millions of stars light up largest and most detailed shot of Milky Way’s centre
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- ESA's Euclid telescope captured more than 60 million stars in the Milky Way's galactic bulge in the largest, most detailed visible-light image of the region ever produced, built from a mosaic of nine camera pointings.
- The €1bn (£862m) Euclid mission, launched in 2023 to map dark matter and dark energy, took 26 hours of observations of the galactic center in March of the previous year, with each pointing covering an area larger than the full moon.
- Dr Eamonn Kerins of the University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics said the dataset fires 'the starting pistol' on exoplanet discovery, projecting growth from about 6,000 known exoplanets to more than 100,000 across the galaxy.
- Kerins said the Euclid snapshot will improve microlensing measurements of exoplanets by up to a factor of three, because it captures the same stars before they overlap, enabling precise stellar motion tracking and planetary mass confirmation.
- NASA's Nancy Grace Roman space telescope, scheduled to launch in August, is expected to find about 1,500 microlensing exoplanets and an additional 100,000 transiting planets, with Euclid data helping distinguish true planetary signals from binary star systems.
- Euclid's visible-light camera is unusually suited to resolving individual stars in the densely packed galactic bulge, a capability the telescope was not originally designed for but which researchers now call a 'superb facility' for the work.
- The Euclid mission targets the roughly 95% of the universe made up of dark energy (about 70%) and dark matter (about 25%), with the new galactic-center image doubling as a resource for stellar-level exoplanet work.
Why it matters: Euclid's galactic-bulge image gives astronomers a stellar reference catalog that improves microlensing exoplanet measurements by up to threefold, directly boosting the yield of NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman telescope and potentially expanding the known exoplanet count from ~6,000 to over 100,000 within the coming decade.
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