Scientists are delighted by the first crisp, clear images from ESA’s new space telescope
EUCLID, 7 NOVEMBER 2023
In November, ESA scientists unveiled the first scientific images sent back by the Euclid mission. The five images included the shots seen here of the Horsehead Nebula (main image), spiral galaxy IC 342 (top left) and the Perseus galaxy cluster Abel 426 (top right). Euclid aims to discover more about dark energy and dark matter. The telescope is designed to capture widefield images of vast regions of the night sky – as opposed to focusing on small, specific areas, as the James Webb Space Telescope does – at a higher resolution than was possible using previous survey telescopes, such as the ground-based VLT Survey Telescope.
Euclid launched from Cape Canaveral on the back of a Falcon 9 rocket on 1 July 2023 and arrived at the Sun–Earth Lagrange point L2, some 1.5 million kilometres beyond Earth’s orbit, 30 days later. It will remain in halo orbit at L2 for at least six years.
Two heads are better than one
HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE AND JAMES WEBB SPACE TELESCOPE, 9 NOVEMBER 2023
The JWST was designed to replace Hubble, but this picture of galaxy cluster MACS 0416 shows what can happen when the two are used in parallel. A visible light Hubble image and an infrared JWST image were combined to produce this stunning composite, which reveals new, hitherto unseen galaxies in the cluster’s outlying regions.
Jupiter in UV
HUBBLE SPACE TELESCOPE, 7 NOVEMBER 2023
This false-colour image of Jupiter taken
