The brand new Euclid space telescope is hard at work to create the largest cosmic 3D map ever made, and is producing stunning pictures in the process. The European Space Agency (ESA) has released an image of a nebula lying 1,300 light-years away where Euclid caught the birth of stars.
The image was captured by Euclid’s Near-Infrared Spectrometer and Photometer (NISP) instrument and features a sprawling complex of dusty gas clouds. Euclid’s infrared abilities make peering through dust clouds easier as it can gather light from objects hidden behind them.
📷This shimmering view from @ESA_Euclid shows the dark cloud LDN 1641. Though nearly invisible to the human eye, Euclid’s infrared vision uncovers a rich landscape of gas, dust and dozens of newborn stars.https://t.co/lkV0xrNRwK pic.twitter.com/NUloMa9ftn
— European Space Agency (@esa) November 5, 2025
ESA says that the nebula, which is part of the so-called ‘dark cloud,’ named LDN 1641 in the constellation Orion, is teeming with newborn stars. The spewing out of material from objects embedded in the dusty regions is a telltale sign of star births.
“Euclid observed this region of the sky in September 2023 to fine-tune its pointing ability,” ESA said in a statement. “For the guiding tests, the operations team required a field of view where only a few stars would be detectable in visible light; this portion of LDN 1641 proved to be the most suitable area of the sky accessible to Euclid at the time,” it added.
The photographed region of the nebula is equivalent to more than three times the area of the full Moon in the sky, but the data was collected in just under five hours, ESA said showcasing Euclid’s operational prowess.
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Euclid’s mission
Named after the father of geometry, the Euclid telescope launched on July 1, 2023 to make a 3D map of the universe from the second Lagrange Point or L2 (1.5 million kilometres from Earth). Its task is to investigate how dark matter and dark energy have shaped the evolution of the universe and one way to do that is by documenting the subtle changes in the appearance and motions of visible objects in space.
Euclid is creating the map featuring billions of galaxies to reveal the influence of dark matter and dark energy on the universe otherwise invisible to us. Over the next six years, the telescope will observe the shapes, distance and motions of galaxies as far as 10 billion light-years away.
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