It took a new and special space telescope to parse out each one of these individual stars gleaming in a dizzying mass at the center of our own dear Milky Way galaxy.
The European Space Agency’s Euclid Telescope, orbiting 1 million miles from Earth at the 2nd Lagrange Point—an orbit it shares with NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope—the probe took 9 of these photographs in visible light while pointed at the galactic center for 26 hours straight.
It shows the incredible density of stars located at the center—60 million in just a snapshot of the sky the size of your average full moon, but it wasn’t aiming for the stars per se, rather the planets almost certainly to be orbiting them.
“It was never built with this science in mind,” Dr. Eamonn Kerins, an astrophysicist at the University of Manchester, reminded the Guardian, “but it has proved to be a superb facility for the work.”
“This data fires the starting pistol in a new age of exoplanet discovery, where we go from knowing about 6,000 exoplanets to finding more than 100,000 across the galaxy.”
Put aside any notions you have about humans finding a new place to live or looking for aliens and exoplanet astronomy is still the most exciting aspect of the field for the average person.
GNN’s reports on exoplanet study include such worlds as one almost as big as its star, another that orbits two stars like Tatooine from Star Wars, some which don’t rotate and have permanent dark and daytime sides, one with the density of a marshmallow, a gaseous giant with clouds that turn to stone, and one that’s shaped like a lemon where it rains diamonds.
Even still, as Dr. Kerins said, the Euclid telescope was built to study dark matter and dark energy.
The universe is believed to be made up of 5% regular matter, 25% dark matter, which tends to clump around galaxies and may even be responsible for coalescing them, and 70% dark energy which is believed to be fueling the expansion of the universe.
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Though infrared light is more appropriate for studying these invisible forces spread across so many cosmic acres, Euclid’s visible light camera is designed to image large chunks of the night sky over many hours to track star movements. This will give information on the forces moving them—even the ones that can’t be seen.
However, it also provides an exceptional method of seeking out exoplanets: using the microlensing method of detection.
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The way this works is through an observational phenomenon called lensing. When viewing a star located behind another star, the gravity of the nearer star bends the light coming from the farther star, making it appear brighter. If that lensing suddenly increases in intensity, it’s often because an orbiting exoplanet passed the star at its closest point, so close that its gravity intensified the light’s distortion.
For this reason, Euclid is believed to be well-positioned to coordinate the locations of tens of thousands of exoplanets, each one ready for closer examination with a telescope like James Webb or Hubble.
Euclid was launched in 2024.
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