Free Astronomy Magazine September-October 2026

SEPTEMBER-OCTOBER 2026 Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. Rhodes serves as both the U.S. Euclid science lead and the NASA JPL Roman project scientist. “This takes a lot of work and plan- ning, so it really has to be some- thing with a high impact for science. Adding Euclid’s snapshot to Ro- man’s future survey will help us map our galaxy better and identify hard-to-find cosmic treasures like isolated black holes and rogue planets more easily.” Euclid took one day out from its six- year prime mission to preview the area of sky that will be targeted by Roman’s Galactic Bulge Time-Do- main Survey, which will provide one Galactic center: Euclid previews Roman by NASA Ashley Balzer A new look at the heart of our Milky Way galaxy by Euclid, an ESA (European Space Agency) mission with NASA contributions, overlaps with a re- gion scientists will observe with NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, launching later this sum- mer. This sneak peek gives as- tronomers a major jumpstart on a core Roman survey, helping scien- tists learn more than they could from either telescope alone. “This is the only time Euclid has paused its normal sky survey, which is mainly geared toward cosmol- ogy,” said Jason Rhodes, a senior research scientist at NASA’s Jet T he above image from Euclid (with color added using ground- based images) zooms in on the cen- ter of our Milky Way galaxy. The region gets its golden tone from myriad old, cool stars that have yel- lowish hues. Stars in this region are heavily crowded, so observing in this direction increases the likeli- hood of catching microlensing events. [ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consor- tium/NASA, CFHT, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre and E. Bertin (CEA Paris-Saclay)] of the deepest views ever into the center of our galaxy. Though Eu- clid’s one-time observation is shal- lower and lacks some of the color