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3h ago

Euclid Captures Largest, Sharpest Visible‑Light Mosaic of the Milky Way Bulge

Euclid's 26‑hour snapshot gives Roman and other telescopes a pre‑event reference frame to confirm exoplanets and enable mass measurements.

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

  • The European Space Agency released the mosaic on Wednesday showing more than 60 million individual stars in the galaxy's crowded central bulge from nine pointings taken over 26 hours in March 2025.
  • Euclid's visible‑light camera delivers Hubble‑like sharpness while covering far larger sky patches per exposure, letting it resolve stars in regions where ground telescopes blur together.
  • Because the campaign lasted only about a day, Euclid did not record microlensing events that require weeks of monitoring, but its image freezes the pre‑alignment star field that future surveys can use as a baseline.
  • Teams preparing NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will compare Roman's time‑series microlensing data to Euclid's snapshot to separate overlapping sources, confirm planets and derive their masses more precisely.
  • Beyond exoplanets, the dataset will support studies of stellar motions, dust, brown dwarfs and binaries and shows how a cosmology mission can yield high‑value data for local Galactic science.