The wealth of new data from the mission – described as the ultimate discovery machine – includes details of 500 galaxies that seem to experience a phenomenon known as strong lensing.

This is where light from more distant galaxies is bent around closer galaxies due to gravity, like how light is focused through a glass lens on Earth. 

The way the light bends indicates the total mass, which includes both visible matter and, potentially, dark matter – so scientists can analyse this, begin to identify where dark matter is located, and understand its properties.  

Euclid’s data is revolutionising the study of strong lensing. New techniques using machine learning and AI have been developed to find these rare objects. Citizen science has also contributed significantly, with over 1000 volunteers participating in visual inspections.

Euclid’s transformative capabilities

Before Euclid, astronomers had to choose between wide-field images from lower resolution telescopes like the Dark Energy Survey in Chile, or detailed zoomed-in images from telescopes like Hubble, but only on small regions. Euclid, with its 609 megapixel camera led by the UK, combines both panoramic mode and detailed imaging. The area mapped in this release is already a significant fraction of all the sky covered by Hubble since 1990.  

This innovation is transformative for strong lensing studies, which require large panoramic images to locate rare objects and detailed views to analyse them. 

Dr James Nightingale, Research Fellow, Newcastle University School of Mathematics, Statistics and Physics, is part of the research team.

He said: “For the past decade, my research has been defined by painstakingly analysing the same 50 strong gravitational lenses, but with the Q1 data release, I was handed 500 new strong lenses in under a week. It’s a seismic shift — transforming how I do science practically overnight.

UK Science Minister, Lord Vallance said: “The UK space sector is playing a leading role in the Euclid mission which, as this new data shows, is revealing more about the role of gravity in our Universe, and the nature of dark energy and matter. The British-made visible imager and data processing tools are central to these observations.  

“The technological advances achieved in missions like this will not only benefit our understanding of the universe, but may help us to better process data here on Earth, helping us to grow our economy and support our Plan for Change.” 

The Euclid mission, launched in July 2023, carries a visible imager (VIS) from the UK, funded by £37 million from the UK Space Agency. The VIS, designed and built by a UCL-led team, is a super high-resolution camera (609 million pixels), with a focal plane about the size of a large pizza box, that can take incredibly detailed pictures of the sky. It is currently observing billions of galaxies up to 10 billion light years away.  

The new data release includes observations of distant regions of space, displaying hundreds of thousands of galaxies and many transient phenomena—astronomical events that are temporary or short-lived relative to cosmic history. These include supernovae (explosions of stars at the end of their life cycles), gamma-ray bursts (extremely energetic explosions observed in distant galaxies), and fast radio bursts (brief but intense bursts of radio waves from unknown sources in space). 

All of this allows scientists to gain insights into the dynamic processes occurring in the universe. The release classifies over 380,000 galaxies and 500 gravitational lens candidates. 

The ‘quick’ data release

Euclid ‘quick’ releases, such as this one, are of selected areas, intended to demonstrate the data products to be expected in the major data releases that follow, and to allow scientists to sharpen their data analysis tools in preparation. The mission’s first cosmology data will be released to the community in October 2026. 

Nestled among these galaxies are strong gravitational lenses. This rare phenomenon is seen around massive galaxies that can distort or warp space-time so much that light from objects behind them can be brought into view as rings, arcs or multiple images. 

The team used a combination of machine learning with visual inspection from citizen scientists and the team to develop an efficient discovery engine. 

The UK has played a pivotal role in the Euclid mission, contributing significantly to the development of both the mission’s instruments and data processing capabilities.

Adapted with thanks from UK Space Agency. Read the original press release.

Image caption: This is a zoom-in of Euclid’s Deep Field North, showing the Cat’s Eye Nebula in the centre of the image, around 3000 light-years away. Also known as NGC 6543, this nebula is a visual ‘fossil record’ of the dynamics and late evolution of a dying star. This dying star is shedding its outer colourful shells. Credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre, E. Bertin, G. Anselmi