By BlueShift | 2026-07-01

From its deep space location 1.5 million kilometers from Earth, the European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope captured a rare image of extraordinary beauty that shows the "heart of the Milky Way" in the most detail to date.

Captured with the telescope's visible light camera over 26 hours in March 2025, the image is a composite of nine photographs of an area known as the galactic bulge, with each covering an area of the sky larger than the moon.

The image, which shows more than 60 million stars, along with nebulas and star clusters, brings the extremely bright inner region of our galaxy into sharp focus.

The original image was captured in black and white, but color added using observations from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope located in Hawaii transformed it into a heavenly mantle of glittering gold.

It can be seen in full resolution on the ESASky platform.

Launched in July 2023, Euclid began observations in February 2024. Its six-year mission is focused on bringing to light the hidden influence of dark matter and dark energy on the visible universe.

The space telescope will observe the shapes, distances and motions of billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years.

Designed to observe faraway galaxies, its visible light camera is sensitive enough to tell apart individual stars in the Milky Way's densely packed galactic bulge, without being blinded.

This is why Euclid briefly turned its gaze away from these faraway galaxies to focus on the center of our own, at the request of astronomers searching for exoplanets around other stars using microlensing.

Identifying exoplanets

Microlensing is a phenomenon where gravity bends light, which happens in space whenever objects align. Astronomers actively monitor millions of stars to find these alignments, and use the data to discover hidden planets and dark matter.

The Euclid image therefore establishes a base from which scientists can measure the mass of planets that are already known, as well as planets that are yet to be discovered.

"This means that anyone who detects a microlensing event in the same region ... will be able from now on to use Euclid data as a time reference in the past and see how the stars looked before they overlapped," said Natalia Rektsini, who led Euclid’s galactic bulge data release.

"Since Euclid can clearly separate individual stars, one can then measure how fast they move over time and use that information to confirm the existence of a planet and determine its mass," she said.

"This would not be possible with data from one point in time."

Overlapping observations

The Euclid observation overlaps with a region scientists will observe with NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launching later this summer, "helping scientists learn more than they could from either telescope alone," per NASA.

"In 24 hours, Euclid has already captured the stars involved in all the future microlensing events that the Roman space telescope will detect, but before the stars and planets involved have aligned,” Rektsini said.

"During the last 20 years, almost 300 exoplanets have been discovered using this technique, all with ground-based telescopes and all towards the centre of our galaxy," French astronomer Jean-Philippe Beaulieu said in an ESA statement.

The new image from Euclid "includes 51 known planetary systems -- and it will assist in studying many more that will be found," he added.

Built and operated by ESA, Euclid is a medium-class mission in ESA’s Cosmic Vision program, and includes contributions from NASA.

The Euclid Consortium includes around 2,000 scientists from 300 institutes in 15 European countries, the United States, Canada and Japan, and is responsible for providing the scientific instruments and scientific data analysis.

Thales Alenia Space served as prime contractor for the construction of the satellite and its service module, while Airbus Defense and Space developed the payload module, including the telescope.

NASA provided the detectors of the Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer.