20. March 2025
(CONNECT) The Euclid mission from the European Space Agency (ESA) published its initial data spanning observations of 26 million galaxies on March 19. Swiss institutes are playing a key role in the mission’s success by contributing vital technologies, cutting-edge algorithms, and calculation infrastructures. This has facilitated the identification of hundreds of candidates for gravitational lensing, i.e. the bending of light due to a galaxy’s gravity.
The University of Geneva developed galaxy classification algorithms for the mission and provided decisive technologies for the Euclid telescope together with APCO technologies based in Aigle in the Swiss canton of Vaud. It also operates one of the ten central data centers processing Euclid’s data and composed two of the 34 studies published.
The Institute for Data Science at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) based in Windisch in the canton of Aargau led the development of Euclid’s HPC framework, a sophisticated software stack that is used for data processing in supercomputers. The FHNW is also part of the team that has detected 500 new gravitational lens candidates to date.
The University of Zurich developed and optimized Euclid’s flagship simulation. This depicts the distribution of matter across the universe with hitherto unprecedented accuracy and is central to the development and validation of Euclid’s complex data analysis methods.
ESA’s Euclid mission was launched July 2023 and aims to provide insights into the structure and evolution of the universe by mapping more than a third of the sky and observing 26 million galaxies. Among other things, the role of gravity and the nature of dark energy and dark matter are being researched. ce/nta
