The center of the Milky Way is on fire, lit with pinky purple and golden hues in a stunning new image captured by Euclid, a European Space Agency (ESA) space telescope.
The gold-and-plum glamour offers a glimpse at the heart of our galaxy—an area called the galactic bulge, where some 10 billion stars are packed tight together in an elongated football shape. It’s also a sneak peak at a region of the sky that NASA will explore in depth with the upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, scheduled to launch no earlier than August 30.
Euclid paused its normal sky survey to capture the image, NASA senior research scientist Jason Rhodes said in a statement.
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“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,” Rhodes said.
The full image, below, includes about 5 square degrees of the sky—the equivalent of 25 full moons. On the right side, the telescope peers through the galactic plane as if through fog; the dark patches are thick molecular clouds—regions of cold, dense dust and gas where new hydrogen molecules form. Toward the upper left of the image, the galactic plane thins and Euclid gets a clearer view of distant stars.
This image by ESA’s (European Space Agency) Euclid (with color added using ground-based images) provides an earlier snapshot of a region of our galaxy that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will repeatedly observe during the upcoming years.
ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CFHT, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin (CEA Paris-Saclay)
Euclid captured the image in a single day, but the Roman telescope will take a deep look at 1.7 square degrees, or 8.5 full moons’ worth of sky, over five years. Its repeated observations will reveal new planets and other itinerate cosmic objects. Roman will also be on the lookout for microlensing events, which happen when a star, planet, black hole or another massive object aligns with a star from the viewpoint of the telescope. The mass of the giant object gently bends the light from the star, magnifying the view of object.
Among these mystery objects? Massive black holes left behind after the death of the biggest stars. Some of these black holes are so huge that they create long-lasting microlensing events, which is part of why scientists want to observe a small patch of sky over many years, to understand how they change and evolve over time.
Euclid’s broader, less-detailed preview provides a baseline for Roman’s first observations. The ESA’s telescope’s data will also be combined with Roman’s Galactic Plane Survey, which will map a large area of the flat, star-filled plane of the Milky Way in unprecedented detail.
“We’ve shown that these two telescopes can work together to do science that surpasses what either was originally designed for,” Rhodes said. “In doing so, we’ve established a model for future coordinated observations that can unlock far more discoveries than either mission could make alone.”
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