Expansion of the Universe.
© 2011 EPFL
The origin of the accelerating expansion of the Universe is one of the most fascinating challenge of XXIst Century in cosmology and fundamental physics, leading to the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics, awarded on 4 October 2011.
On the same day the 2011 Nobel was announced, the European Space Agency (ESA) decided to select the EUCLID satellite as one of its next scientific missions. The main goal of EUCLID will be to understand the origin of the Universe's accelerating expansion that physicists and astronomers refer to as "Dark Energy". EUCLID will observe 1.5 billions of galaxies over a large fraction of sky and will track the observational signatures of dark energy, dark matter and gravity on the geometry of the Universe and the cosmic history of structure formation.
Several Swiss partners are contributing to Euclid: the Swiss Space Office, the EPFL, the University of Geneva (UniGE), the University of Zurich (UniZH), and Brugg HET.