Euclid Telescope Image Boosts NASA's Roman Mission to Map Milky Way
Quick Look
The European Space Agency's Euclid telescope captured a bright image of the Milky Way's galactic bulge, providing crucial context for NASA's upcoming Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission, which will chart stellar changes and identify cosmic objects.
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Why It Matters
The European Space Agency's Euclid telescope has been documenting the dark universe and recently detoured to image the Milky Way's galactic bulge. NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is scheduled to begin its five-year mission later this summer to chart changes in stars and other celestial objects in the bulge.
A large portion of our space coverage stems from the James Webb Space Telescope, but today we're featuring an image from a different lens. The photo above is a portion of a larger image from the European Space Agency's Euclid telescope, which has primarily been documenting the dark universe. This very bright image came from a detour that refocused Euclid on the galactic bulge, which is astronomers' name for the bulbous center of the Milky Way.
But it's more than just a beautiful picture. This snapshot offers a jump start to a NASA project that's due to begin later this summer. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will start its five-year mission to chart changes in stars and other celestial objects in a small portion of the bulge. Having additional context for the area from Euclid before Roman even begins collecting data will offer the researchers more insights than either telescope would deliver alone.
"Adding Euclid's snapshot to Roman's future survey will help us map our galaxy better and identify hard-to-find cosmic treasures like isolated black holes and rogue planets more easily," said Jason Rhodes, a senior research scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and a member of the US teams for both the Euclid and Roman projects.
What to Watch
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The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will begin its five-year mission later this summer.
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