PARIS: The Euclid space telescope has captured the largest and most detailed photo ever taken of our galaxy’s crowded heart, a dazzling image packed with 60 million stars, the European Space Agency said on Wednesday.

The new photo of the Milky Way’s bright centre will help in the search for planets beyond our Solar System, the agency added.

At the centre of our spiral galaxy “lies the bulge — a large bubble containing billions of stars”, French astronomer Jean-Charles Cuillandre, who works on the Euclid mission, said. Euclid launched in 2023 on a mission to chart one-third of the sky in the hopes of shedding light on the enduring mysteries of dark matter and dark energy.

“Now we’ve decided to point Euclid at the brightest area of the sky — and it works superbly, it’s extraordinary,” Cuillandre said.

Euclid, which is hovering 1.5 million kilometres (930,0000 miles) from Earth, captured the image with its visible light camera over 26 hours in March 2025. The mosaic is composed of nine photographs, each covering an area of the sky larger than the Moon.

The original image was captured in black and white, but colour was added using observations from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope located in Hawaii.

Published in Dawn, June 25th, 2026