(NewsNation) — New images taken by the Euclid space telescope, which will give scientists more information about “large-scale cosmic mysteries,” were released by the European Space Agency on Thursday.
Scientists say this shows how new technology will give them the ability to explore dark matter and dark energy, according to NASA, which contributed to the project. NASA defines dark matter and dark energy as “mysterious substances that affect and shape the cosmos.”
“Euclid shows star-forming regions in unprecedented detail, uncovering 300,000 new objects in one shot, including free-floating planets that are four times the mass of Jupiter,” European Space Agency Director General Josef Aschbacher said in a broadcast from the agency’s Space Astronomy Center in Madrid, according to Space.com. “During its mission, it will help us to better understand our universe, what it is made of, and how it has expanded and evolved over cosmic history.”
New pictures revealed from the space telescope Thursday show a variety of views, including a star-forming region in the Milky Way with clusters of hundreds of galaxies.
As part of the Euclid Mission, the space telescope will create a map of the large-scale structure of the universe by observing billions of galaxies across more than a third of the sky. The Euclid space telescope uses a field of view that’s wider than NASA’s Hubble and James Webb space telescopes, which are meant to study smaller areas in finer detail.
With Euclid, scientists will be able to chart the presence of dark matter “with higher precision than ever before,” NASA wrote.
First launched from Cape Canaveral in Florida on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 last July, the Euclid space telescope has sent back a few images, Space.com wrote, with pictures expected to become more frequent.