You’ve never seen the Milky Way in such detail before
ESA has combined nine images from its space telescope to create a single image with a resolution of 324 megapixels. It is intended to serve as a reference image for the discovery of exoplanets.
The European Space Agency’s (ESA) Euclid space telescope has captured the most detailed photograph to date of the centre of the Milky Way. The image shows the «galactic bulge», the densely packed central region of our galaxy, in the visible light spectrum. More than 60 million stars are visible in it. The data is expected to fundamentally change the search for exoplanets.
Source: ESA
On 23 March 2025, Euclid photographed the galactic centre for around 26 hours. The result is a mosaic comprising nine individual images. Each of these captures an area of the sky larger than the full moon. The final image measures 18,000 × 18,000 pixels, or around 324 megapixels. You can find it here in high resolution.
Euclid was actually developed to map distant galaxies and thereby study dark matter and dark energy. Its camera for the visible light spectrum is so high-resolution that it can resolve individual stars within the crowded galactic bulge. According to ESA, the camera achieves a level of sharpness similar to that of the Hubble Telescope’s Wide Field Camera, but covers an area of the sky 270 times larger per exposure.
Source: ESA
Reference image for exoplanet research
This combination of resolution and field of view makes the new image particularly valuable for exoplanet research. There are 51 known planetary systems in the observed region. Exoplanets can be detected using a technique known as the microlensing effect. When a star in the foreground passes in front of a more distant star, its gravity acts like a cosmic magnifying glass and amplifies the latter’s light. If there is a planet in the system, its gravity causes a minimal change in the brightness profile.
To capture the full course of a microlensing event, stars must be observed over a period of more than 20 days. Euclid’s 26-hour window is not sufficient for this. However, the image serves as a reference for later observations in which the stars overlap. Researchers can thus determine the speed and, from this, deduce the mass of any planets.
Collaboration with NASA
Euclid will be closely integrated with NASA’s planned Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Roman is set to detect thousands of new exoplanets via microlensing events from the end of August 2026 at the earliest. The region that Roman will monitor is entirely within Euclid’s field of view. The new image thus acts as a timestamp: anyone who discovers an event using Roman can combine it with Euclid’s reference data, thereby significantly improving measurement accuracy.
Microlensing is particularly well suited to cold, outer-orbiting planets that are difficult to detect using other search methods. Over the past 20 years, just under 300 exoplanets have been discovered using this technique with conventional telescopes, all of them near the galactic centre. Euclid’s new data could massively increase this number in the long term. And, of course, the image is simply stunning.
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