Paris

European Space Agency’s (ESA) dark universe probing Euclid mission has beamed back the first full-colour images of the cosmos.

The first five science images released on Tuesday include views of a large cluster of thousands of distant galaxies, close-ups of two nearby galaxies, a gravitationally bound group of stars called a globular cluster, and a nebula (a cloud of gas and dust in space where stars form) — all depicted in vibrant colours. The images show the entirety of these celestial objects, while remaining extremely sharp, even when zooming in on distant galaxies.

 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. Euclid will for the first-time allow cosmologists to study these competing dark mysteries together, explains ESA Director of Science, Professor Carole Mundell.

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, Mundell added.

The new images include 1000 galaxies belonging to the Perseus Cluster, and more than 100,000 additional galaxies further away in the background. Perseus is one of the most massive structures known in the Universe, located ‘just’ 240 million light-years away from Earth.

This is the first time that such a large image has allowed us to capture so many Perseus galaxies in such a high level of detail, the ESA said in a statement.