The European Space Agency (ESA) has dropped another picture captured by the Euclid telescope and it’s possible it might break your brain. Captured over 26 hours, this brand new image focuses on the centre of the Milky Way and features over 60 million stars. ESA says that Euclid, which is installed in space at second Lagrange Point (L2), leveraged its multi-wavelength observation capability to observe a patch of the sky larger than the full Moon (when viewed from Earth) in visible light.
Today, our Euclid mission revealed the largest, most detailed photo ever taken of our galaxy’s centre in visible light.
🔗 https://t.co/JFEIkHuraz pic.twitter.com/9YZr5AAbVH
— European Space Agency (@esa) June 24, 2026
The image was taken during a survey in March 2025 to observe the galactic bulge – the extremely bright inner region of the Milky Way.
Euclid telescope and its groundbreaking science
A team of astronomers led by Jean-Philippe Beaulieu of the Institut d’Astrophysique de Paris in France wanted to study this bulge because they believe it’s the perfect place to search for exoplanets using a phenomenon called microlensing.
Microlensing is a form of gravitational lensing – the phenomenon in which the gravity of a foreground object (stars or galaxies) bends the light from a background object, causing the latter to appear brighter and slightly magnified.
ESA says that Euclid is capable of unravelling massive faraway objects through gravitational lensing but the new image could help scientists study small-scale lenses and discover exoplanets. Microlensing happens when two stars align with the observer and when one star crosses another, the nearest one (to that of the observer) acts as a magnifying glass. During this magnification, the light bends and the background star’s light gets brighter. But if there’s a planet orbiting the nearer star, it also bends the light in an uneven way; this acts as a telltale sign of the presence of a planet.
“To catch microlensing, you need to observe parts of the sky that are crowded with stars, such as close to the centre of our galaxy,” Jean-Philippe Beaulieu said in a statement. Almost 300 exoplanets have been discovered using this technique in the last two decades all towards the Milky Way’s centre.
“This image from Euclid includes 51 known planetary systems – and it will assist in studying many more that will be found,” he said.
Euclid is primarily built to explore the composition and evolution of the dark universe. It launched in July 2023 and is tasked with creating a 3D map of the universe by observing billions of galaxies out to 10 billion light-years. While planetary science is secondary, Euclid’s exceptional capabilities make it scientifically valuable.
