Euclid releases 60 million star image of Milky Way core

The European Space Agency's Euclid space telescope has captured the largest and most detailed visible-light image ever taken of the Milky Way's galactic core, revealing more than 60 million individual stars. The image, a six-gigapixel mosaic, was created from 26 hours of observations conducted in March 2025 and publicly released this week. While Euclid's primary mission, launched in 2023, is to map dark matter and dark energy, this detour provides a critical reference for future exoplanet discovery.

The snapshot focuses on the densely packed galactic bulge, a region about 26,000 light-years from Earth where most telescopes struggle to separate individual stars. Euclid's visible-light camera, with a sensitivity comparable to the Hubble Space Telescope but a field of view 270 times larger, was uniquely capable of the task. Scientists say the data marks the beginning of a new era in finding planets beyond our solar system.

A key application is the study of microlensing, a phenomenon where the gravity of a foreground star bends and magnifies the light of a background star, acting as a cosmic magnifying glass. If a planet orbits the foreground star, it creates a detectable spike in...