Built to map the dark universe across billions of light-years, the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope turned its gaze closer to home, and in a 26-hour survey of the crowded center of the Milky Way, resolved more than 60 million stars, in images released June 24.
That catalogue will now help NASA’s upcoming Roman Space Telescope hunt for planets around distant stars, comparing its own observations with the base data acquired by Euclid.
A telescope designed to weigh the invisible scaffolding of the cosmos and answer certain questions, has opened the door onto an entirely different question. The tools we build to solve one problem often raise a dozen more, expanding the potential reach of the human mind.
