The Largest, Most Detailed Image of the Milky Way’s ‘Heart’ Shows 60 Million Stars
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Facebook X LinkedIn Reddit WhatsApp Flipboard Bluesky Email Copy Link Home → Space → Astronomy The dark-universe telescope turned inward and caught 60 million stars.
Euclid has taken the largest and most detailed photo ever made of our Milky Way galaxy’s center in visible light, capturing more than 60 million stars in just over a day. The image gives astronomers something they have never had at this scale: a clean, early look at the same stars NASA’s Roman telescope will soon monitor for hidden planets. As those stars drift and line up in the years ahead, scientists can use Euclid’s snapshot to verify faint planet signals and weigh worlds that may be cold, distant, and nearly impossible to find any other way.
Euclid normally looks far beyond the Milky Way. Its main job is to map billions of galaxies and track how dark matter and dark energy shape the universe. But on March 23, 2025, astronomers aimed it at the Milky Way’s galactic bulge — the bright, packed region around the galaxy’s center.
In about 26 hours, Euclid’s visible-light camera stitched together nine “pointings,” each covering more sky than the full moon. The result was this sharp, enormous view of stars, nebulae, star clusters, and dark clouds of gas and dust. Euclid can separate individual stars in a field where ground-based telescopes struggle with Earth’s atmosphere and overwhelming crowding.
ESA says Euclid’s visible-light sharpness is comparable to Hubble’s wide-field camera, but each Euclid pointing covers an area 270 times larger. “It was never built with this science in mind,” said Dr. Eamonn Kerins, an astrophysicist at the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, according to The Guardian.
“But it has proved to be a superb facility for the work.”
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