Project leader: Hannu Kurki-Suonio Personnel
Euclid is the next cosmology missions of the European Space Agency (ESA). The main purpose of Euclid is to study the so-called “Dark Energy Question”: why is the expansion of the Universe accelerating? Is it due to “dark energy” permeating the universe, does the law of gravity deviate from General Relativity at cosmological distances, or is there yet another explanation, possibly related to effects of inhomogeneities on observations? The launch is expected in July 2023. In 6 years Euclid will photograph over one third of the sky in visible and near infrared, obtaining images of over a billion galaxies and spectra of tens of millions of galaxies. Based on this data, the Euclid Consortium will determine the 3-dimensional distribution of galaxies and dark matter in the Universe, compare their statistics to cosmological models and thus constrain the law of gravity and the dark energy equation of state.