Euclid views intracluster light in Abell 2390

This image is released as part of the Early Release Observations from ESA’s Euclid space mission. All data from these initial observations are made public on 23 May 2024 – including a handful of unprecedented new views of the nearby Universe, this being one.

This image is a higher resolution, close-up cutout from a wider frame featuring galaxy cluster Abell 2390. It shows the ‘intracluster light’ – light emitted by stars that have been torn away from their parent galaxies – in enhanced white-grey colouring. This hints at the distribution of dark matter in both the cluster and associated filament of the ‘cosmic web’.

[Image description: Thousands of stars and galaxies are spread over this image. One very big bright star lies on the left, and another on the centre bottom of the image. These stars and many smaller ones around them have six diffraction spikes coming from a central light-halo. In the central region, a white fog covers several stars and galaxies.]