The team behind the Euclid observatory released their first data yesterday, and Zooniverse projects and participants were especially prominent. Euclid’s mission is to make a map of the whole sky which can be used for cosmology, to determine the factors governing the evolution of the Universe on the grandest scales – and along the way it is capturing new images which show the sky in unprecedented detail.

Though yesterday’s data release, taken from the observatory’s first seven days of data and covering only half a percent of the final study area, isn’t enough to draw cosmological conclusions, there’s plenty of science in there already. Nearly 10,000 Galaxy Zoo volunteers participated last summer in classifying nearly 100,000 galaxies, a dataset used to train a machine which has sorted through the rest. Meanwhile, Space Warps volunteers have been busy tagging candidate strong gravitational lenses – galaxies whose light has been distorted by the gravitational pull of a second system sitting in our line of sight – with more than 500 new candidates.

You can read more about these new lens discoveries on the Space Warps blog: https://blog.spacewarps.org/2025/03/19/space-warps-helps-to-find-497-spectacular-lenses-in-euclid-data/ .


These results are included in three of the papers made public yesterday and available here: https://www.euclid-ec.org/science/publications/. We especially recommend the two papersled by the inexhaustible Mike Walmsley (https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15310 and https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15324 as well as this https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.15328 led by Space Warps PhD student Phil Holloway).

You can also catch Mike, Phil and colleagues talking about their work here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGqaxDH00Yw&ab_channel=CosmologyTalks
…and if you want to explore the data yourself, then you can find what you need here: https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/euclid/euclid-q1-data-release

Written by Chris Lintott

Image: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by M. Walmsley, M. Huertas-Company, J.-C. Cuillandre