![]() “I wish to congratulate and thank everyone involved with making this ambitious mission a reality, which is a reflection of European excellence and international collaboration. “Our high standards for this telescope paid off: that there is so much detail in these images, is all thanks to a special optical design, perfect manufacturing and assembly of telescope and instruments, and extremely accurate pointing and temperature control,” adds Giuseppe Racca, ESA’s Euclid Project Manager. Now we are ready to observe billions of galaxies, and study their evolution over cosmic time,” says René Laureijs, ESA’s Euclid Project Scientist. They are even more beautiful and sharp than we could have hoped for, showing us many previously unseen features in well-known areas of the nearby Universe. “We have never seen astronomical images like this before, containing so much detail. “Euclid will make a leap in our understanding of the cosmos as a whole, and these exquisite Euclid images show that the mission is ready to help answer one of the greatest mysteries of modern physics.” Euclid will for the first-time allow cosmologists to study these competing dark mysteries together,” explains ESA Director of Science, Professor Carole Mundell. “Dark matter pulls galaxies together and causes them to spin more rapidly than visible matter alone can account for dark energy is driving the accelerated expansion of the Universe. The images released today showcase this special capacity: from bright stars to faint galaxies, the observations show the entirety of these celestial objects, while remaining extremely sharp, even when zooming in on distant galaxies. ![]() What makes Euclid’s view of the cosmos special is its ability to create a remarkably sharp visible and infrared image across a huge part of the sky in just one sitting. By doing this, it will create the largest cosmic 3D map ever made. To reveal the ‘dark’ influence on the visible Universe, over the next six years Euclid will observe the shapes, distances and motions of billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years. But we don’t understand what they are because their presence causes only very subtle changes in the appearance and motions of the things we can see. 95% of our cosmos appears to be made of these mysterious ‘dark’ entities. The colours in this composite image correspond to the glow of oxygen (blue), hydrogen and nitrogen (green), and sulphur (red).Euclid, our dark Universe detective, has a difficult task: to investigate how dark matter and dark energy have made our Universe look like it does today. Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 observed the pillar on 1-2 February 2010. These jets, (known as HH 901 and HH 902, respectively, are signposts for new star birth and are launched by swirling gas and dust discs around the young stars, which allow material to slowly accrete onto the stellar surfaces. Another pair of jets is visible at another peak near the centre of the image. Long streamers of gas can be seen shooting in opposite directions from the pedestal at the top of the image. Nestled inside this dense mountain are fledgling stars. The denser parts of the pillar are resisting being eroded by radiation. Streamers of hot ionised gas can be seen flowing off the ridges of the structure, and wispy veils of gas and dust, illuminated by starlight, float around its towering peaks. Scorching radiation and fast winds (streams of charged particles) from super-hot newborn stars in the nebula are shaping and compressing the pillar, causing new stars to form within it. The image celebrates the 20th anniversary of Hubble's launch and deployment into an orbit around the Earth. This turbulent cosmic pinnacle lies within a tempestuous stellar nursery called the Carina Nebula, located 7500 light-years away in the southern constellation of Carina. The pillar is also being assaulted from within, as infant stars buried inside it fire off jets of gas that can be seen streaming from towering peaks. The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope image, which is even more dramatic than fiction, captures the chaotic activity atop a pillar of gas and dust, three light-years tall, which is being eaten away by the brilliant light from nearby bright stars. This craggy fantasy mountaintop enshrouded by wispy clouds looks like a bizarre landscape from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.
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