Brenna Cooper
People have been left speechless after astronomers released the first photos from a giant map of the universe.
It goes without saying that space is unimaginably massive, but this hasn't deterred scientists and astronomers from attempting to map out as much of the known universe as possible.
One of the most ambitious projects aiming to do this is the Euclid telescope, which is currently mapping out the universe as we speak.
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After launching into orbit in July 2023, the Euclid has been hard at work capturing images in order to create a 3D map of a third of the known universe.
Over a year on from the project launching and the first photographs have been released - and they've left people online absolutely taken aback at the size and depth of what lies beyond Earth.
Despite only being a small portion of the overall map, the images are visually stunning - with the European Space Agency (ESA) revealing on its website that the small patch explored by the telescope is home to '100 million sources' (stars in our Milky Way and beyond).
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Take a look at the images below:
Explaining the significance of the Euclid telescope, Professor Mat Page, of the Mullard space science laboratory at University College London, told PA that scientists will hopefully have a 'harvest of discoveries' once the telescope is finished.
"Before Euclid, we would never be able to see the faint cirrus clouds in the Milky Way, and pick out every star that’s illuminating them in super-high resolution," he explained.
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Popular science communicator and content creator Astro Alexandra has also weighed in on the importance of the telescope, driving home the massive scope of Euclid and its capabilities.
"This is only one percent of what this telescope is going to create over six years," she said on TikTok.
"Eventually it's going to have a third of the night sky mapped... And the best part, is that you can zoom in."
As with the vast majority of conversations involving our cosmos, it wasn't long before the images created by the Euclid left people feeling pretty existential about life and the universe.
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"I cannot comprehend how we’ve figured out how to do this. Like it’s all so far away how do we know," one user confessed, while another added: "I saw this last night and it just kept zooming out and today I’m having an existential crisis."
And the inevitable topic of aliens and UFOs soon entered the conversation, with one person commenting: "How can anyone think that we're alone in the universe!"
Maybe the discovery of extraterrestrial life isn't too far off after all.