ESA's Euclid captures the Milky Way's crowded heart
8 hours ago
- #Milky Way centre
- #exoplanet detection
- #Euclid mission
- ESA's Euclid mission has released the largest and most detailed photo of the Milky Way's galactic centre in visible light, featuring over 60 million stars.
- The image, captured in about 26 hours on March 23, 2025, is a mosaic covering an area larger than what the Hubble Space Telescope can observe, enabling studies of exoplanets via microlensing.
- Euclid's data will serve as a reference for future missions, like the Roman space telescope, allowing scientists to measure the masses of known and newly discovered exoplanets by tracking stellar movements.
- Microlensing, which relies on chance alignments of stars, is particularly effective for detecting cold exoplanets, unbiased by planet size or host star type, with two known icy planets already identified in the data.
- The mission's capabilities in separating individual stars in crowded regions provide unique opportunities for confirming exoplanet existence and studying other phenomena, such as brown dwarfs and stellar motions.