The European Space Agency's (ESA) Euclid mission has published its first major set of scientific data. With this publication, which gathers the light of more than a billion objects and covers an area of the sky equivalent to 9,500 full moons, ESA's dark universe "detective" lays the foundations for creating the largest 3D map of the cosmos. Since the beginning of the Euclid mission, the Institute of Cosmos Sciences of the University of Barcelona (ICCUB) has played a fundamental role in this scientific project that is beginning to unravel the mysteries of the dark universe.
The new data release, named DR1-Foundation, gathers nearly 13 months of observations and constitutes the mission's first major data release since the space telescope's launch in July 2023. For the first time, it offers the scientific community the puzzle pieces needed to begin assembling a detailed 3D map of the cosmos, a fundamental milestone for solving the many mysteries of the dark universe, such as dark energy, dark matter and the cosmic web.
The data are accompanied by spectra and images, including large mosaics of the sky. "This is much more than pretty pictures; today we mark a scientific milestone in our study of the cosmos," says ESA's Director of Science, Professor Carole Mundell. "This landmark Euclid data release represents the largest mapping of its kind ever carried out from space; laying the foundations for future discoveries in a new regime for astronomy, and demonstrating the excellence of European technology and science and of international collaboration," she adds.
"The extraordinary quality and magnitude of this dataset will enable a wide range of studies of the cosmos. These public data will facilitate discoveries by researchers around the world, thereby maximizing the mission's scientific impact. This release, which includes only the data from the mission's first year, is just the beginning. It lays the foundations for a more extensive and complete future dataset," says Francisco Castander, a researcher at the Institute of Space Sciences (ICE-CSIC) and the Institute for Space Studies of Catalonia (IEEC), and a member of the Euclid Consortium.
