ESA’s Euclid space telescope mapped more than 60 million stars in the Milky Way’s central bulge, producing the largest high-resolution visible-light portrait ever of our Galaxy’s crowded heart and opening a new window on alien worlds.
This photo of the Milky Way Galaxy’s center was taken on March 23, 2025 by ESA’s Euclid space telescope. Image credit: ESA / Euclid / Euclid Consortium / NASA / CFHT / J.-C. Cuillandre & E. Bertin, CEA Paris-Saclay.
“Designed to observe billions of faraway galaxies, the space telescope’s visible light camera is sensitive enough to tell apart individual stars in our super-crowded galactic bulge, without being blinded,” members of the Euclid team said in a statement.
“This rare ability is crucial for what scientists want to use this image for: studying planets around other stars using a special technique called microlensing.”
Euclid produced this enormous photo in just about 26 hours on March 23 and 24, 2025.
The telescope captured more than 60 million stars, along with nebulae and star clusters.
“It’s a mosaic of nine ‘pointings’ from its visible light camera, with each pointing covering a patch of the sky larger than the full Moon,” the astronomers said.
“For comparison, Euclid’s sharpness and sensitivity in visible light is similar to the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope’s wide field camera.”
“But each pointing that Euclid captures in a few hours spans an area 270 times larger than Hubble’s field of view.”
“To observe the same Euclid mosaic, the Keck Observatory would need around 2,000 hours,” they noted.
“Euclid is faster, and able to capture details from fainter stars that would be otherwise missed when observing from the ground.”
The new image from Euclid encompasses the entire region that NASA’s upcoming Roman space telescope will monitor for planet hunting.
“This is the only time Euclid has paused its normal sky survey, which is mainly geared toward cosmology,” said Dr. Jason Rhodes, an astronomer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
“This takes a lot of work and planning, so it really has to be something with a high impact for science.”
“Adding Euclid’s snapshot to Roman’s future survey will help us map our Galaxy better and identify hard-to-find cosmic treasures like isolated black holes and rogue planets more easily.”
“One of the most exciting aspects of the Euclid observations is that they give us the chance to test and improve Milky Way models,” added Dr. Matthew Penny, an astronomer at Louisiana State University and co-lead of Euclid’s exoplanet science working group.
