ESA's Euclid Telescope Releases First Images, Begins Mapping Universe's Dark Matter and Energy

Euclid's mission to map a third of the sky over six years aims to understand two dark mysteries: dark matter's influence on galaxies and dark energy's acceleration of the universe's expansion.

ESA's Euclid space telescope has released its first images, showing a level of detail that surpasses expectations and reveals previously unseen features in known areas of the nearby universe.
The telescope's mission is to photograph large portions of the sky to construct the largest 3D cosmic map ever made, with the third dimension being time.
Unlike other telescopes that primarily go deep, Euclid aims to cover a breadth of the night sky, intending to image one-third of it over a span of six years.
By looking at a large-scale cosmic structure and peering back into time, the mission hopes to study the effects of dark matter and dark energy on cosmic evolution.
While we cannot directly image dark matter or dark energy, through this large-scale examination and by observing billions of galaxies and their evolution over time, Euclid will help astronomers understand these dark mysteries that make up 95 percent of the universe.