Euclid releases largest visible-light image of the Milky Way crowded center, six gigapixels and 60 million stars
ESA's Euclid telescope released the largest high-resolution visible-light image ever made of the Milky Way's crowded center: a six-gigapixel view with more than 60 million stars, across a patch of sky about 22 times the full Moon. The goal is finding hidden planets. Per ESA.
ESA's Euclid space telescope has released what its team calls the largest high-resolution visible-light image ever made of the Milky Way's crowded center. Captured in March 2025 and published on 24 June as part of the mission's second Quick Data Release, the six-gigapixel frame holds more than 60 million stars across nine adjoining fields, covering a stretch of sky roughly 22 times the area of the full Moon. The point of staring at such a dense, dust-choked region is not the stars themselves but what moves in front of them. Euclid's team plans to hunt for planets around other stars using gravitational microlensing, a technique that catches the brief brightening that happens when one star drifts precisely in front of another. In a field this crowded, those alignments are far more common, which is what makes the galactic bulge such useful hunting ground. The release already contains 51 known planetary systems, and the data is expected to help astronomers measure masses and distances for roughly 60 exoplanets that had been detected before but never fully characterized. For anyone tracking the search for worlds beyond our own, the value here is less the single image than the catalogue of stars it turns into a long-term planet-finding survey. Per ESA.