A stunning peek into the deep mysteries of our universe is giving astronomers and stargazers alike just a sliver of what’s to come amid the European Space Agency’s 6-year quest to create the largest cosmic 3D map ever made.ESA officials released just the first part of the map – a massive 208 gigapixel image that encompasses just 1% of the part of the universe the agency’s Euclid telescope aims to survey.The mosaic contains over 260 observations made over two weeks in late March and early April across 132 square degrees of the southern sky, ESA officials said.Just the first section of the map has over 100 million celestial finds, such as stars in our Milky Way galaxy and other galaxies beyond as far away as 10 billion light-years – measured in time that light has traveled in space to reach Euclid.”This stunning image is the first piece of a map that in six years will reveal more than one-third of the sky,” Valeria Pettorino, Euclid Project Scientist at ESA, wrote in a news release. “This is just 1% of the map, and yet it is full of a variety of sources that will help scientists discover new ways to describe the Universe.”The incredible resolution of the imagery allows astronomers to zoom in and enlarge items hundreds of times to observe the great detail of spiral galaxies and other celestial items.They also hope to study dim “galactic cirrus” clouds that are a mix of gas and dust interspersed between stars in our own galaxy and learn about the hidden influences dark matter and dark energy have on the universe, ESA said.ESA’s Euclid was launched in July 2023 and began observations in February. The cosmic mapping project is now already 12% complete with additional data release planned in February 2025 and a recap of the first year of the survey due to be published in 2026.