The European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope has delivered the most detailed visible-light mosaic of the Milky Way’s central region, capturing over 60 million stars. This image is invaluable for studying exoplanets through microlensing and measuring their masses with greater precision.

While designed to observe distant galaxies, Euclid’s camera managed to resolve individual stars in our galactic bulge—no small feat given the area’s intense brightness and density. Over 26 hours of observation, it captured a mosaic composed of nine separate exposures, each covering an area larger than the full moon.

Compared to the Hubble Space Telescope, Euclid's visible-light images are equally high quality but cover areas over 270 times larger in just a few hours. This means that the Keck Observatory would need about 2,000 hours to achieve similar results. The new image includes 51 known planetary systems and will aid in studying many more exoplanets.

Euclid’s data will serve as a reference archive for future missions, enabling detailed studies of exoplanets and precise measurements of their masses. In just 24 hours, it has captured the stars involved in all future microlensing events that the Roman space telescope will detect, providing a time reference for exoplanet research.