Prof Andy Taylor, of the University of Edinburgh, who leads the UK science ground segment for the mission, said while there were bigger surveys, none had the detail and the information content of Euclid. By contrast the Hubble telescope has produced images of incredible resolution, but does not cover as large an area of the sky.

“The technological leap that’s Euclid is that we can keep that high resolution, but now we can basically map huge volumes of the sky, huge volumes of the universe,” Taylor said.

Now, the first major Euclid data release has landed, offering researchers an unprecedented view of the cosmos. “It’s the biggest high-resolution image of the universe we’ve ever had,” Taylor said.