Euclid releases its first major haul of data on the cosmos
· BehindLines newsroom
On 12 November 2026, the European Space Agency (ESA) released the first major batch of data from the Euclid space telescope. Live Science mentions observations of more than 900 million galaxies, New Scientist 900 million; according to Live Science, Carole Mundell, ESA's director of science, sees a scientific milestone in the study of the cosmos.
What the release contains
According to Live Science, the data also cover 60 million light sources powered by black holes in the early Universe. They were gathered over 13 months and represent about 14% of the area the telescope is meant to survey during its six-year mission. The volume reaches 1.7 million gigabytes. According to ESA, quoted by Live Science, each object is like a "puzzle piece" whose spectrum gives clues about its composition and distance.
New Scientist says this batch is called DR1-Foundation and covers an area of sky equal to 9,500 full moons. Euclid, launched in 2023, is to observe about a third of the sky over six years. The main mosaic assembles 740 images taken in autumn 2024 and spring 2025, spanning 367 square degrees of northern sky. In its sharpest version it reaches 500 gigapixels.
Gravitational lenses by the thousand
Live Science reports more than 15,000 candidates for strong gravitational lenses: massive objects, such as large galaxies, curve space-time, and the light of objects behind them appears magnified, distorted and sometimes duplicated, forming so-called Einstein rings. Natalie Lines of the University of Portsmouth, a member of the Euclid Consortium, says in a statement that the forecast made more than ten years ago, that Euclid would revolutionise the discovery of these lenses, has now come true.
The published images include the spiral galaxy M81, about 12 million light-years away according to New Scientist, the ring galaxy NGC 1291, 33 million light-years away according to both outlets, and the Abell 3128 cluster, about 800 million light-years away according to New Scientist, which contains a strong gravitational lens.
Why it matters
This is a first slice: according to Live Science, about 85% of the survey remains to be done, and it is now up to the scientific community to make use of these observations. Apart from the lens candidates, these articles detail no specific discovery; they mainly present the data as the basis of a future map of the cosmic web.