Peering into the galactic heart: a mosaic of 60 million stars

Space · Published 26 October 2026 Swipe more like this →

In short: The center of our galaxy is so dense and bright it usually defies photography. Yet, by repurposing technology designed to hunt dark energy, astronomers have captured the most detailed visible-light portrait of the Milky Way's core ever made—revealing a glittering tapestry that may soon help us find new worlds.

In March 2025, the European Space Agency’s Euclid space telescope captured a six-gigapixel view of the galactic bulge. While Euclid was primarily built to study dark matter and dark energy, astronomers spent 26 hours pointing its visible light camera at the brightest area of the sky. By stitching together nine 'pointings'—each larger than the full moon—they created a mosaic covering 4.8 square degrees, an area roughly 22 times the size of the Moon as seen from Earth.

The resulting image reveals over 60 million stars in a region dominated by old, cooler stars that give the bulge its characteristic yellow and gold hue. Because Euclid's camera is sensitive enough to differentiate between individual stars even in this extreme brilliance, it serves as a powerful tool for exoplanet discovery. This data is expected to help transition our knowledge from roughly 6,000 known exoplanets to potentially finding more than 100,000 across the galaxy.

The image also highlights the complexity of our galactic neighborhood. It reveals 'seemingly empty' dark patches which are actually dense, dust-rich molecular clouds that block light from stars behind them. In other regions, Euclid captured active star formation where massive blue stars ionize hydrogen gas, creating a faint red glow. This survey provides a high-resolution map of the environment surrounding Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole at our galaxy's center, which possesses a mass more than four million times that of the Sun.

While Euclid provided this visible-light milestone, other instruments offer different perspectives. NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope recently captured infrared data of the Sagittarius C region, showing 500,000 stars and protostars in unprecedented detail. Together, these observations allow scientists to test theories of star formation in the Milky Way's most extreme environments.

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