Euclid View of Milky Way Heart Previews Core Survey by NASA’s Roman

This image by ESA’s (European Space Agency) Euclid (with color added using ground-based images) provides an earlier snapshot of a region of our galaxy that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will repeatedly observe during the upcoming years. Credits: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CFHT, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin (CEA Paris-Saclay) This image by ESA’s (European Space Agency) Euclid (with color added using ground-based images) provides an earlier snapshot of a region of our galaxy that NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will repeatedly observe during the upcoming years. Euclid spent one day taking a series of nine individual images near the heart of the Milky Way. Its wider image has resolution similar to Roman’s, though it’s also shallower and lacks some of the colors Roman will see. At the right of the frame, Euclid looks through the dense foreground of the Milky Way’s galactic plane, where thick molecular clouds appear as dark patches that obscure parts of the galactic bulge beyond. Toward the left, the view rises to higher galactic latitudes: the yellow glow of the bulge becomes clearer, with fewer and more isolated foreground clouds interrupting the starlight. ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, CFHT, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin (CEA Paris-Saclay) A new look at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy by Euclid, an ESA (European Space Agency) mission with NASA contributions, overlaps with a region scientists will observe with NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launching later this summer. This sneak peek gives astronomers a major jumpstart on a core Roman survey, helping scientists learn more than they could from either telescope alone. “This is the only time Euclid has paused its normal sky survey, which is mainly geared toward cosmology,” said Jason Rhodes, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory i