The European Space Agency’s Euclid space mission celebrates its first scientific results with impressive space images

​ANDl Co.Euclid nsortium publishes the first scientific papers based on observations made by the Euclid telescope. Euclid Consortium scientists observed and analyzed several scientifically interesting targets in its early observations, providing insight into the telescope’s unprecedented power to create the most accurate map of our Universe over time.

The scientific findings are accompanied by five new images highlighting early observations of Euclid. In addition to these first and promising scientific results, the Consortium is also publishing mission background documents confirming Euclid’s excellent results. This happened less than a year after the space telescope launched and about six months after the first full-color images of space were captured.

“The first images of Euclid are amazing. They demonstrate their enormous scientific potential by covering large fields with unprecedented resolution. Although they were originally intended as a simple example of the mission’s potential, they led to many interesting scientific results that have now been published,” says Francisco Castander, researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) and the Space Institute. Studies of Catalonia (IEEC).

The full set of initial observations focused on 17 astronomical objects, from nearby clouds of gas and dust to distant galaxy clusters, before Euclid conducted the main sampling. The goal of this research is to unlock the mysteries of the dark space and reveal how and why the Universe looks the way it does today.

Unprecedented results

Euclid will trace the hidden webbed foundations of the cosmos, map billions of galaxies across more than a third of the sky, explore how our Universe formed and evolved throughout cosmic history, and explore the most mysterious of its fundamental components: dark energy. and dark matter.

Euclid compiled this first catalog in one day, revealing more than 11 million objects in visible light and another 5 million in infrared light. This catalog gave rise to important scientific developments.

Although stunning in appearance, the images are much more than just beautiful.neas; reveal new physical properties of the Universe thanks to the new and unique observational capabilities of Euclid. These scientific secrets are described in more detail in 10 supporting papers published by the Euclid Consortium, which will be available tomorrow on arXiv (link below), as well as five key background papers on the Euclid mission.

Early results show Euclid’s ability to search star-forming regions for free-floating roaming planets with just four times the mass of Jupiter; study the outer regions of star clusters in unprecedented detail and map different stellar populations to explore how galaxies form; developed over time. They show how the space telescope can detect individual star clusters in distant galaxy clusters and identify a rich set of new dwarf galaxies detached from their host galaxies, and much more.

Among the published scientific articles, the active participation of institutions and researchers from Spain in the Euclid Consortium stands out. In particular, a publication dedicated to Euclid’s ability to search for star-forming regions on floating “wandering” planets was prepared by Eduardo Martin Guerrero de Escalante, a researcher at the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC). This work is an example. the power of the Euclid mission to provide the area and depth needed to study very low-mass populations, including free-floating planets from nearby star-forming regions and very young open clusters.

“Our first paper was about developing a method to carefully search for free-floating newborn planets within a few Jupiter masses using Euclid, which is like searching for needles in a haystack. Euclidean images of the Messier 78 and Cabeza del Caballo regions hide dozens of dark, free-floating planets, and the challenge is to distinguish them from millions of background stars and extragalactic objects that can display all kinds of colors, says Eduardo Martin Warrior . Escalante.

Photo: New Euclidean image of the star-forming region Messier 78. Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuylandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi; Standard CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA license. ​​

Researcher at the Cantabrian Institute of Physics (IFCA CSIC-UC) José Maria Diego, participated in the study of one of the objects studied by Euclid, this is a gravitational lens or massive cluster of galaxies, the so-called Abel 2390. In this work, the IFCA CSIC-UC researcher managed to obtain the first map of the distribution of matter around and in the center of this cluster (mainly dark matter), which has not yet been studied in such detail.

Another interesting result was obtained by studying the intracluster light and intracluster globular clusters of the Perseus cluster. Based on the characteristics of this light, astronomers involved in the study suggest that the stars were torn from the outskirts of galaxies and resulted in the complete destruction of smaller clusters of galaxies, dwarf galaxies. Another surprising discovery is that these stars, which would be expected to orbit the largest galaxy in the cluster, instead orbit a point between the two brightest galaxies. This new observation suggests that Perseus may have recently merged with another group of galaxies, causing a gravitational disturbance that led to the observed shift. Mireya Montes, an IAC researcher involved in the study, notes that “this work was only possible because of Euclid’s sensitivity and acuity.”

Moreover, five additional reference publications confirm Euclid’s outstanding achievements. Among them is a simulation of the Euclid Flagship, led by ICE-CSIC and IEEC researchers Francisco Castander and Pablo Fosalba. The simulation is a simulated catalog of billions of galaxies, based on the largest cosmological simulation ever performed, and intended to prepare for scientific use of the Euclid mission. The catalog was created using SciPIC, a set of algorithms integrated into a powerful process designed to create huge catalogs of synthetic galaxies. The pipeline runs at the Euclid Scientific Data Center, located at the Port d’Informació Cientifica (PIC), a high-throughput big data platform that can create a 15 TB catalog of 5 billion galaxies in 3 hours. Simulations developed to train and validate ground segment algorithms before launch are now used for measurement, calibration, and bias correction.

“This is the most detailed and complete simulation of galaxy exploration ever conducted. We are very pleased to publish this simulated galaxy catalog to help exploit the wealth of cosmological information that the survey data will provide,” adds ICE-CSIC and IEEC researcher Pablo Fosalba.

Main photo caption: New Euclidean image of the galaxy cluster Abell 2390. Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuylandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi; Standard CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO or ESA license. ​​