Scientists help capture images after launching telescope on a balloon as big as a football stadium

British scientists have helped create mesmerizing images of galaxies using a balloon the size of a football stadium.

Thanks to Durham University and an international team of astronomers, a £4.1 million balloon telescope successfully launched from New Zealand’s Wānaka Airport on Sunday.

The Superpressure Balloon-borne Imaging Telescope – known as SuperBIT – was sent out on a 100-day mission to investigate the mystery of dark matter.

Hovering at 108,000 feet above Earth, it has already captured some breathtaking images of the antenna galaxies collide 60 million light years away.

These spiral galaxies began colliding several hundred million years ago, making them among the youngest colliding galaxies to be witnessed by astronomers.

The vibrant pink Tarantula Nebula, a large star-forming region 161,000 light-years from Earth, was also photographed.

Durham University said: ‘Our astronomers are part of an international team behind the successful first research flight of an innovative balloon telescope that will investigate the mystery of dark matter.

“SuperBIT has already captured its first images on this flight, showing the “Tarantula Nebula” – a region of the Large Magellanic Cloud where new stars are being born, and the collision of the “Antenna Galaxies” NGC 4038 and NGC 4039.”

SuperBIT’s primary purpose is to measure the properties of dark matter, which consists of particles that do not absorb, reflect, or emit light.

Despite being completely invisible to the human eye, dark matter is all around us and poorly understood.

SuperBIT is trying to explore numerous theories about the matter, including whether it can be delayed, distributed, or even chipped.

It will also try to map the matter around galaxy clusters by measuring how it distorts the space around them, known as “weak gravitational lensing.”

To do this, the telescope is at an altitude above most of the Earth’s atmosphere – a suitable height for many astronomical observations.

Images similar to those from the Hubble Space Telescope will also be collected by the balloon telescope.

While the Tarantula Nebula was previously captured by both Hubble and NASA’s new $10bn (£7.4bn) James Webb Space Telescope, the SuperBIT has its own advantages.

Astronomers at Durham University claim the telescope has a wider field of view than Hubble and costs 1,000 times less than a comparable satellite.

Using helium is also much cheaper than rocket fuel, with NASA also agreeing that balloon-based telescopes are a lot cheaper.

The SuperBIT team is a collaboration between NASA, Durham University, the University of Toronto in Canada, and Princeton University in New Jersey.

Designs converged two years ago in July, at a time when massive science projects were taking off in an effort to map the dark matter in the universe.