The universe is simply too large for us to fully comprehend. Its total size may in fact be infinite. The amount we can see comprises miles too vast to name, let alone fully understand.
Still, it's amazing to see it visualized even partially like this:
On 15 October 2024, [the European Space Agency's] Euclid space mission revealed the first piece of its great map of the Universe, showing millions of stars and galaxies.
This first chunk of the map, which is a huge mosaic of 208 gigapixels, was revealed at the International Astronautical Congress in Milan, Italy, by ESA's Director General Josef Aschbacher and Director of Science Carole Mundell.
Like we said - hard to fully comprehend:
The full view is incredible enough. But zoom in and you'll see that it captured full details at the galactic level:
The full-resolution image can be found here (it's just a wee bit too big to include in this post). The image "already contains around 100 million sources: stars in our Milky Way and galaxies beyond."
One hundred million sources. And it's still not even anywhere near complete:
This stunning image is the first piece of a map that in six years will reveal more than one third of the sky. This is just 1% of the map, and yet it is full of a variety of sources that will help scientists discover new ways to describe the Universe.
So if I'm reading that correctly, this is one percent of one third of the night sky ... and it's already more massive than we can really wrap our heads around.
If you need a further illustration of how big everything is out there, here's the size of the visualization (highlighted in yellow) against a larger sky map:
A further, deep-field release is planned for March of next year.
Ad astra!
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