The European Space Agency (ESA) has released stunning new images taken by the Euclid space telescope. The team behind these remarkable views of the cosmos say they could help scientists hunt for rogue planets, study mysterious dark matter and explore the evolution of the Universe. The ESA says the five pictures are "unprecedented" and a "treasure trove" coming less than a year since the telescope was launched. To create these images, they observed 17 astronomical objects, from nearby clouds of gas and dust to distant clusters of galaxies. ESA also released images showing "cutouts" of the five main images which provide closer views of areas of interest. The team behind the project are immensely proud of the images they've captured. "It's an extraordinary feeling. Imagine that I've been working for Euclid for 16 years and mainly on...always on Euclid simulated data, trying to develop the pipeline that would be needed to then analyze the data and now finally the idea that a community of people has finally put such sophisticated optics in space at 1.5 million kilometers from Earth," says Valeria Pettorino, ESA’s Euclid Project Scientist. The new images accompany the mission’s first scientific data which the ESA also making public and 10 forthcoming science papers. "I think it's really the start of a new era in which we will really address fundamental questions in the understanding of our universe," says Pettorino. The images captured by Euclid are at least four times sharper than those we can take from ground-based telescopes, according to the ESA. They cover large patches of sky looking far into the distant Universe using both visible and infrared light,. Over six years, Euclid will survey one-third of the sky.