This image represents about 1.5% of Euclid’s Deep Field South, revealing faint, distant galaxies, including a galaxy cluster nearly 6 billion light-years away. The Euclid mission, led by the European Space Agency (ESA) with significant contributions from NASA, is on a groundbreaking journey to investigate one of the universe's greatest mysteries: why is the universe expanding at an accelerating rate? This phenomenon, referred to as "dark energy," is one of the most puzzling aspects of cosmology, and Euclid aims to provide key insights by capturing images of billions of galaxies. On March 19, ESA released a portion of the mission's data to the public, showcasing the mission's early progress. The data, labeled as a “quick” release, offers a preview of what’s to come from Euclid’s detailed observations. This initial dataset focuses on specific regions of the sky, known as the "deep fields," which will serve as Euclid’s focal points for its most distant ob...
In this week’s NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope Picture of the Week, we are introduced to a stunning view of one of the Milky Way’s closest neighbors – the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC). A dwarf galaxy located about 200,000 light-years away, the SMC resides primarily in the constellation Tucana, with a small part extending into the constellation Hydrus. Because of its proximity, the SMC is one of the few galaxies visible to the naked eye from Earth, without the need for a telescope or binoculars. For stargazers in the southern hemisphere and certain northern latitudes, the SMC appears as a faint fragment of the Milky Way itself, though in reality, it is far removed from our galaxy. Thanks to the Hubble Space Telescope's advanced 2.4-meter ‘eye’ and highly sensitive instruments, the view of the SMC is much more detailed and vivid than what is visible to the human eye. The Wide Field Camera 3 on Hubble captured this breathtaking scene using four different filters that observe distinc...