Euclid’s first survey identifies over 900 million galaxies for dark matter research

The European Space Agency’s Euclid mission has released its first major survey, identifying more than 900 million galaxies and giving researchers a detailed view across a large area of the sky. The data could help investigate dark matter and dark energy, which are thought to account for about 25% and 70% of the universe respectively.

The release covers about 14% of the sky Euclid plans to map and includes more than 60 million potential quasars. It also contains around 15,000 probable cases of strong gravitational lensing, in which a foreground galaxy bends and magnifies light from a more distant one; researchers knew of about 1,000 such cases before. Scientists expect Euclid to find roughly 170,000 by the end of its mission, and a further data release is expected next summer.