Always a bit special to see science come from a spacecraft I had the pleasure of working on. Honestly there were a lot of issues during the build of Euclid that I was very glad to not be a part of, but seeing the images coming out of it now is pretty damn impressive.

Hope all of the engineers that struggled to get this mission spacebourne can enjoy!

We can spot the orphan stars at this distance. However, Euclid needs to turn to closer targets than the Pegasus cluster to spot rogue planets.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/23/eucl....

In this case, it found dozens of rogue planets in the Orion nebula, which is only 1,500 ly away.

I am presuming there are also going to be great numbers of rogue planets in deep space, not tied to any star or galaxy. But there would be no way for Euclid to spot them at that distance. Stars were hard enough.

I presume, in due time, there will be some sort of calculable estimation or projection of orphan stars and rogue planets per cubic parsec or kilosparsec.

Impressive photos from the ESA site: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Space_Science/Euclid...

The stars near us in the Milky Way are tens of light years away, and we’ll have to do some incredible science and technology to visit them.

How much worse would it be if you were an intelligent life form on a planet orbiting one of those orphans, and the nearest star was a thousand, ten thousand, even a million light years away?

I really find hard to believe how people can say "well, maybe it's not that easy to have other forms of life in the Universe". I mean, we have a cluster with thousands of galaxies, which make it for millions of stars, 240 MILLION light years away. Which means that there is a 240 million years window in which we are basically blind. Any communication from there will never reach the human race, most probably. Philosophically we can say there is no life there as we are concerned, because we will never be able to see any proof of it, but that doesn't mean that there was anyway, or there currently is, and maybe in more than one planet.

High resolution view: https://sky.esa.int/esasky/?target=49.6809329688%2041.614370...

So an orphan star is one that's been ejected from its galaxy.

If one of those stars had a planet with something capable of "gazing up at the night sky", does that mean their sky would be empty compared to our own?

Website seems down. Alternate links:

https://scitechdaily.com/euclid-mission-uncovers-1-5-trillio...

https://thedebrief.org/euclid-first-look-stunning-new-images...

...I was under the impression that there was a faint blue glow coming from everywhere, that was hypothesized to be extra galactic stars. Has there been any follow up on that?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_star#Observation...

That's a lot of stars indeed. The human mind cannot even comprehend this number. Not to mention all those planets and moons around those stars

Euclid is bringing together 14+ countries and damn near every related field.

Warms my little nerd heart.

Euclid Consortium

To date 14 European countries contribute to EC activities (Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland and United Kingdom).

Canada and USA through NASA and few US laboratories as well as few Japanese laboratories are also contributing and members of the Euclid Consortium.

In total, more than 2600 members were or are registered in the EC (status early 2023), of which more than 1000 are researchers in astrophysics, cosmology, theoretical physics, and particle physics.

More than 200 laboratories covering all fields in astrophysics, cosmology, theoretical physics, high energy, particle physics and space science that are relevant for the Euclid missions are contributing to Euclid.

https://www.euclid-ec.org/consortium/about-ec/

I assume this is being hugged to death?

504 Gateway Time-out

The server didn't respond in time.

[dead]

It's dead, Jim.

TFA specifies "more than 1,500 billion". That's more than a _trillion_, not "billions"! Why the reluctance to use the proper number?