Euclid Stares at the Galactic Bulge
Time for another update from ESA’S Euclid Space Mission: the largest and most detailed photo ever made of our Galactic centre in visible light was taken by the Euclid mission. For just one day (23rd March 2025), Euclid turned its gaze towards the extremely bright inner region of our Milky Way galaxy, known as the galactic bulge. This extraordinary picture is not part of the Euclid’s main cosmological survey, which is designed to look at objects far outside our own Galaxy, but was made in response to a special request from astronomers who were after what Euclid does best: capturing large areas of the sky in crisp detail. Packed with more than 60 million stars, this image opens the door for scientists to confirm the existence of any exoplanet found in this region and measure its mass using tiny changes in starlight over time.
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. This ability is crucial for what scientists want to use this image for: studying planets around other stars using a special technique called gravitational microlensing.
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 2000 hours. Euclid is faster, and able to capture details from fainter stars that would be otherwise missed when observing from the ground. This single mosaic also encompasses the entire region that the upcoming Roman space telescope will monitor for planet hunting.
You can learn more about this by visiting the official account of this on the ESA website and/or watching this video:
In the Dark 
Leave a comment