The Horsehead Nebula, 1375 light-years away, the closest star-forming region to Earth, imaged by ESA’s Euclid mission
Many other telescopes have taken images of the Horsehead Nebula, but none of them are able to create such a sharp and wide view as Euclid can with just one observation. Euclid captured this image of the Horsehead in about one hour, which showcases the mission's ability to very quickly image an unprecedented area of the sky in high detail.
The goal of the Euclid mission, launched in July 2023, is to map around a third of the Universe beyond the limits of the Milky Way and see how it has evolved over time. Euclid’s VIS visible light instrument employs a mosaic of 36 CCD sensors, each of which contains more than 4000 pixels by 4000 pixels. This gives the detector a total of about 600 megapixels, equivalent to almost seventy 4K resolution screens. These observations are supplemented by Euclid’s NISP instrument, which splits infrared light coming from distant galaxies to derive key data, including their speed of outward expansion – measuring their ‘red shift’, on the same principle as a police radar gun.
Today, we know that as we look up into the night sky we are peering back in time into a mysteriously expanding Universe, some 14 billion years old. Just as astronomy eventually outgrew the limits of the human eye, to peer further out into space the need became clear for space-based telescopes, beyond the distortions of Earth’s atmosphere. International cooperation has enabled progressively more powerful space-based observatories, unveiling a whole new cosmos about us. The NASA-ESA-CSA James Webb Space Telescope is looking back to the creation of the very first galaxies of the early Universe.