A hint of holiday sparkle ✨⁣⁣:

⁣⁣The @EuropeanSpaceAgency’s Euclid mission launched on July 1, 2023, with NASA contributions. The space telescope is performing as expected after traveling nearly 1 million miles to its vantage point. ⁣⁣

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The spiral galaxy above also known as the “Hidden Galaxy,” is the first of five images released from the Euclid mission. Located about 11 million light-years from Earth, it lies behind a crowd of dust in the Milky Way. Euclid is able to peek through the dust to study it by using a near-infrared instrument. “Euclid’s first images mark the beginning of a new era of studying dark matter and dark energy,” said Mike Seiffert, Euclid project scientist at @NASAJPL. NASA teams will join Euclid scientists to study the dark energy, dark matter and galaxy evolution found in space. ⁣⁣

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Image description: A big spiral galaxy is visible face-on in white/pink colors at the center of this square astronomical image. The galaxy covers almost the entire image and appears whiter at its center where more stars are located. Its spiral arms stretch out across the image and appear fainter at the edges. The entire image is speckled with stars ranging in color from blue to white to yellow and red, across a black background of space. Blue stars are younger and red stars are older. A few of the stars are a bit larger than the rest, with six diffraction spikes.⁣⁣

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Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO⁣⁣

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28 November 2023