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Many a space enthusiast first became interested in the topic when they saw some astounding picture taken by one of the world\u2019s great telescopes and began to get a sense of scale of the universe. This author personally remembers the first time he saw Hubble\u2019s Ultra Deep Field \u2013 arguably the image that has changed his life more than any other. Given the massive size of the universe, there are always more incredible pictures to be taken, and now humanity has a new tool for that task. Euclid, the European Space Agency\u2019s dark matter\/energy hunter, has released its first set of images \u2013 and they are absolutely mesmerizing.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n One of the most breathtaking is something equivalent to the famous Ultra Deep Field shot. Except in this case, Euclid decided to concentrate on the Perseus Cluster, a group of over 1,000 galaxies located about 240 million light years away from us. It\u2019s one of the most massive known structures in the universe and will undoubtedly shed some insights into the nature of dark matter and how it affects galaxy formation.<\/p>\n But even more impressively, the shot of the cluster also contains around 100,000 additional galaxies in the background, some as far as 10 billion light years away from us. So look again at those little dots in the background \u2013 each of those is a galaxy, and while it might not be quite as big as the Milky Way, it is still likely comprised of hundreds of millions of stars. If that doesn\u2019t provide some sense of scale of the universe, it\u2019s unclear what would be able to.<\/p>\n \n