5 revolutionary photos that show the Universe as we've never seen it . These are the first images captured by the Euclid space telescope , presented by ESA and already considered revolutionary . They show myriads of unknown and very distant galaxies , a gigantic cluster of stars captured at a glance like never before, cradles of planets seen by penetrating the curtain of dust that hides them. Although they are still considered a test, they contain traces of the dark matter and energy that occupy 95% of the cosmos . The same ones that the instrument will have to help us know thanks to its lenses.

Emotion aside, experts already understand the extraordinary significance of these photos. The first is that of the Perseus cluster : in addition to the thousand galaxies in the cluster, the image shows another 100,000 much more distant ones, some very faint and never seen and others so distant that their light has traveled for 10 billion years before of being captured by Euclid's tools. Another photo is of the spiral galaxy IC 342 , known as the “ Hidden Galaxy ,” which the telescope found thanks to its infrared view . But the surprises don't end there: there is the galaxy NGC 6822 , whose irregular shape reveals its primitive nature and finally the globular cluster NGC 6397 appears, with its hundreds of thousands of stars . Furthermore, for the first time a gap has been “opened” between the gas and dust that surround the Horsehead Nebula , discovering planets in formation and newborn stars .

The telescope, launched on July 1, 2023, obtained its first test images at the end of the same month. But the collection will come into force starting from January 2024. Designed to run for six years, Euclid was put in place to obtain the most extensive 3D map of the universe. in the mission, plus the United States with NASA, 300 research institutes and 80 companies, for a total of 3,500 active people and 140 industrial contracts.