Fresh satellite data reveals spectacular space discoveries

Data sheds light on how mysterious forces shaped the evolution of the Universe.

Q1 Release

The “quick look” (Q1) release of the first survey data from the European Space Agency’s pioneering Euclid satellite – made public today – has led to a flurry of scientific advances that further our understanding of the cosmos. 

Launched in July 2023, Euclid is mapping the Universe with unprecedented precision and accuracy. By examining more than one billion galaxies over six years, this groundbreaking space telescope aims to explore two of astronomy’s biggest mysteries: dark matter and dark energy.

Despite covering less than 0.5 per cent of the complete study area, the data is already proving to be a treasure trove for UK scientists.

Researchers from the University of Edinburgh lead the UK’s involvement in the data analysis and host the UK’s Science Data Centre for Euclid.

As a key part of the Euclid Consortium, Edinburgh processes the huge amounts of data from the satellite before it is studied by teams in the UK and across the wider community. This process is already having exciting ramifications for astronomy.

Spectacular discoveries

Euclid has scouted out the three patches of the sky that it intends to, eventually, make the deepest observations of its mission: Deep Field North, Deep Field Fornax and Deep Field South. Put together, these previews of the Euclid deep fields make up the equivalent area of sky more than 300 times the full Moon.

Many of the results using this data have been led by UK based scientists, including discoveries of strong gravitational lensing systems, the characterization of active galactic nuclei (AGN) and the identification of supernovae.

Those results are described in a set of 27 scientific publications, as well as 7 technical papers that describe how this data has been processed by the Science Ground Segment, which receives the initial data from the Euclid satellite and transforms it into data that scientists can work with instantly.

Science Ground Segment

Edinburgh’s leading role in the partnership of seven UK universities which contribute strongly to the Science Ground Segment is instrumental not only to today’s data release, but also more extensive releases in the coming years.

Professor Andy Taylor of the University of Edinburgh, who leads the UK Science Ground Segment and the gravitational lensing data analysis for the mission, said:

These latest results show just how powerful Euclid is for astronomy and how fantastically its data analysis pipeline is working, with such high-quality data over huge areas of the sky. The strong sensing results in particular, led by UK teams, are a huge advance of previous analysis. It has been a lot of hard work over many years to develop, but the results are amazing.

Dr Gordon Gibb, University of Edinburgh and Technical Lead of the UK Science Data Centre, said:

The vast quantity of data collected by Euclid requires considerable infrastructure on the ground to process it. Edinburgh proudly hosts the UK's data centre for Euclid processing, comprising state of the art hardware and an excellent team of software developers and scientists to ensure timely delivery of high-quality data ready for scientific exploitation. 

A much larger data release, DR1, is scheduled for October 2026 which will include results about the nature of dark energy.