Asking ‘how big is space?’ is like asking ‘how long is a piece of string?’; the answers are infinite. Despite the ever growing nature of the expanding universe, humans have not found it too intimidating to study.
The European Space Agency (ESA) has recently released the first images captured by their Euclid telescope and they’re stunning.
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The Euclid telescope’s mission
One thing we have been attempting for quite some time now is measuring the universe.
The ESA’s mission for the Euclid telescope is to create a 3D map of a third of the universe across time and space in order to map its evolution.
The telescope is pretty cool
The space telescope is said to map more than a third of the sky and can see as far as 10 billion light years, which you can imagine holds billions of galaxies across the universe.
It’s looking to study the history of the cosmos and how the universe is expanding across time.
Our first look into the results
Having launched only in July of last year, we now finally have access to some images taken by the Euclid of the third of the sky it aims to cover.
While in the Earth’s orbit, the ESA telescope has been capturing photographs of the sky in order to map out its targeted area of the universe.
The photographs only cover a small fraction
The telescope itself is only made to map a third of the known universe. On top of that, it has only released a small fraction, one percent, of images from it.
However, despite this being a small part of the known universe, the images capture light from over 100 million stars and galaxies.
Euclid could tell us even more
Professor Mat Page of the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London explained that the telescope could provide scientists with great discoveries once its time is over in orbit.
The European Space Agency plans on keeping the telescope up in space for six years, so those discoveries might come sooner than we think.
A Space Tiktoker weighed in
TikTok user astro_alexandra, known for filling her account with space facts and information about the cosmos, has shown these images to her followers on the social media app.
She highlighted information that others may not have known: these images are only one percent of what the telescope will take across its six years.
Naturally, people were bewildered
One commenter on Astro Alexandra’s Tiktok admitted, “I cannot comprehend how we’ve figured out how to do this. Like it’s all so far away how do we know?”
Another wished for the discoveries to come faster, “I wish I was born in the future, that way we could explore this stuff.”
The images gave some an existential crisis
As with every new space discovery, these images drove some people to ask existential questions. One person in the video said, “I saw this last night, and it just kept zooming out, and today, I’m having an existential crisis.”
Another person said, “No way intelligent life isn’t out there somewhere.”
The ESA has big plans for this telescope
Despite the worry that we might not be around to learn more about the universe, the Euclid telescope promises us more exploration soon.
With the telescope mapping out galaxies across 10 billion light years, we could finally learn how the universe grows.
What will we get to see next?
It’s thrilling to see these images and wonder what else exists beyond our Earth.
In science and discovery time, six years is not too long to wait, especially if the reward is a full 3D image of a third of the known universe. Plus, we’re already reaping the rewards.
