10.12.20 – Prof. Frédéric Courbin (LASTRO) associated with CIS was allocated, for the 3rd time in a row, a SNSF sinergia grant related to the ESA-NASA Euclid space mission. The grant, to be shared between EPFL (PI), UniGE, UniZH and FHNW will allow to finalize the preparation of the satellite, to be launched by the end of 2022, and will enable the exploitation of the very first data to come.

Euclid will image with unprecedented quality the whole extragalactic sky in the optical and near-IR domain and mesure the small apparent distortions of 2.5 billion galaxies due to gravitational lensing by large-scale structures. This statistical measurement of so-called weak gravitational lensing, will allow cosmologists to study the nature of dark matter and dark energy. The latter, so far completely unknown in its nature and distribution, is thought to be responsible for the observed accelerated expansion of the Universe, a discovery that lead to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics.