The Euclid space telescope has captured the largest and most detailed photo of our galaxy’s crowded heart, an image packed with 60 million stars, according to the European Space Agency (ESA).
The new photo of the Milky Way’s bright centre will help in the search for planets beyond our Solar System, the agency added.
At the centre of our spiral galaxy “lies the bulge – a large bubble containing billions of stars”, said French astronomer Jean-Charles Cuillandre, who works on the Euclid mission.
The location of Euclid’s galactic bulge
Euclid launched in 2023 on a mission to chart one-third of the sky in the hopes of shedding light on dark matter and dark energy, the components which make up about 95% of the universe.
“Now we’ve decided to point Euclid at the brightest area of the sky – and it works superbly, it’s extraordinary,” Cuillandre said.
Euclid, which is hovering 1.5 million kilometres (930,0000 miles) from Earth, captured the image with its visible light camera over 26 hours in March 2025.
The image is composed of nine photographs, each covering an area of the sky larger than the Moon.
The original image was captured in black and white, but colour was added using observations from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope located in Hawaii.
Euclid’s view of the Milky Way’s bulge
‘Cosmic magnifying glass’
In recent decades, scientists have identified thousands of planets outside our Solar System, which are known as exoplanets.
New exoplanets are unlikely to be identified within the Euclid image, but it will help scientists measure the mass of planets already spotted and those that will be discovered in the future.
It can do this via a process called microlensing, which happens when one-star crosses over another.
The closer star “acts like a cosmic magnifying glass, bending and brightening the background star’s light”, the ESA explained in a statement.
If a planet is orbiting the closer star, its gravity also slightly bends this light. This tiny change in brightness allows scientists to track the planet down.
“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 the 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.
Explaining Euclid’s galactic bulge survey