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22h ago

Euclid Captures Largest High-Resolution Visible-Light Image of Milky Way’s Bulge

The 26-hour mosaic will serve as a pre-event reference for planned microlensing surveys and help confirm and weigh exoplanets detected by NASA’s Roman telescope.

A dense field of tiny stars fills this square image taken by the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope. The lower and central areas are dominated by bright yellow and gold colours, forming a textured background similar to fine glitter or sand. Dark brown and black patches cut irregularly through the yellow regions, like ink stains or clouds of smoke. Toward the upper left, the colours shift to purple and reddish tones, blending gently into the surrounding star field. Small blue points of light are scattered across the image. CREDIT ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CFHT, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin (CEA Paris-Saclay)
Image
Sixty million stars and 51 planetary systems were captured in the images
The original picture was taken in black-and-white, with colour added using data from a ground-bound telescope

Overview

  • Euclid produced the mosaic from nine overlapping visible-light pointings taken over about 26 cumulative hours on March 23, 2025, resolving more than 60 million individual stars in the crowded galactic bulge.
  • The image contains 51 known planetary systems and was colorized using ground-based CFHT data while preserving Euclid’s Hubble-like sharpness across a field hundreds of times larger than Hubble’s single view.
  • Euclid paused its normal cosmology survey once to make this special observation, the only such pause so far in the mission’s operations.
  • The single-day campaign was too short to catch live microlensing events, which typically require about 20 days of monitoring, but the high-resolution snapshot creates a past reference frame that will let future time-series surveys confirm planets and measure their masses.
  • Combined with NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission, due no earlier than Aug. 30, 2026, and ground-based follow-up, the Euclid dataset will improve measurements of stellar motions, interstellar dust, brown dwarfs, binaries and the masses of microlensing-discovered exoplanets.