On June 24, 2026, the European Space Agency (ESA) unveiled the largest and most detailed visible-light image of our galaxy's center. The Euclid space telescope, primarily designed to explore dark matter and dark energy, briefly turned its gaze toward the brilliant and crowded core of the Milky Way. The results exceeded all expectations.
Today, @ESA_Euclid revealed the largest, most detailed photo ever taken of our galaxy's centre in visible light 🙌 This video takes you on a journey across this region. Turn up the volume and enjoy our galactic centre 🤩
Captured on March 23, 2025, the image was produced in just over a day—roughly 26 hours of observation time. It is a mosaic of nine individual frames, each covering an area of the sky larger than the full Moon. In the end, Euclid documented more than 60 million stars, along with nebulae and star clusters within the galactic bulge—the galaxy's central swelling. The image is remarkably sharp: despite the immense density of objects, the telescope distinguishes individual stars without being overwhelmed by the bright background. This level of detail and field of view surpasses the capabilities of many ground-based observatories, which would have required thousands of hours to complete a similar task.
Euclid orbits at the L2 Lagrange point, located 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth. Its high-resolution visible-light camera and wide field of view make it perfectly suited for such missions. To put it in perspective, a single Euclid frame covers an area 270 times larger than Hubble’s wide-field camera while maintaining comparable sharpness. This allows it to survey vast regions quickly and capture fainter stars that are difficult to distinguish from Earth due to atmospheric interference.
However, the primary scientific value of the image lies beyond its beauty. The central region of the galaxy is the ideal location for searching for exoplanets through gravitational microlensing. When one star passes in front of another, its gravity temporarily magnifies the light from the background star, acting as a lens. If the foreground star hosts a planet, that planet causes an additional, albeit tiny, fluctuation in brightness. Euclid's survey area already encompasses 51 known planetary systems, and its data will provide a precious foundation for future discoveries. These observations will complement the work of NASA’s upcoming Roman mission, which will also hunt for planets using the microlensing technique.
This project is a vivid example of how an instrument designed to study the farthest reaches of the universe can also reveal secrets of our own home. While Euclid continues its primary mission to map billions of galaxies, these targeted observations demonstrate its remarkable versatility. Scientists, including Jean-Philippe Beaulieu from the Institut d'astrophysique de Paris, point out that while ground-based telescopes have discovered around 300 exoplanets using this method over the last twenty years, we now have a far more powerful tool in space.
The image is now available to the public, serving as a reminder of how rich, chaotic, and full of surprises the center of our galaxy truly is. Within this crowd of tens of millions of stars, thousands of undiscovered worlds may be hiding. And Euclid has only just begun to help us find them.
