University of Portsmouth astronomers recognised for key role in enabling a highly magnified view of distant galaxies to be captured
A team of scientists, including University of Portsmouth astronomers, has been given a Special Talent and Recognition (STAR) Award, by the European Space Agency’s Euclid Consortium - a space mission to map the Dark Universe.
Announced yesterday (26 March) at the Euclid Consortium Meeting in Leiden in the Netherlands, the award is in recognition of the scientists’ work to find and map strong gravitational lenses in the Universe.
The team - comprising University of Portsmouth PhD students Natalie Lines, Li Tian and former research fellow Karina Rojas, together with colleagues at the universities of Oxford, Newcastle and Toronto - has played a key role in the Consortium’s work.
They have trained machine learning algorithms and citizen scientists to search for strong gravitational lenses. These phenomena occur when massive objects, such as galaxies, distort space-time so much that they warp the light from objects behind them into rings or arcs. Such lenses are incredibly rare and researchers liken it to searching for needles in a haystack, but the team has identified 500 strong lens candidates.
Li Tian said: “These circles around the galaxies are more than just pretty pictures. The properties of dark matter and dark energy can be measured through the shape of the rings.”
“Given that the Euclid Consortium has around 2,000 active participants, this Award is a significant achievement and it is great that so many people are as excited about our work as we are,” said Natalie Lines.
Karina Rojas added: “"I am really proud of what we have achieved as a team. This prize is an opportunity to celebrate our hard work and feel confident in our contributions. With such an amazing team I am very excited to see what we will accomplish in the coming years."
Professor Thomas Collett, from the University of Portsmouth’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation, said: “This award highlights the important role that Portsmouth astronomers are playing in the Euclid Consortium, and the amazing science that the Euclid dataset is enabling. The prize winning work has helped to provide a highly magnified view of distant galaxies, and will allow us to make new measurements of the mysterious dark matter and dark energy that make up 95 per cent of our Universe but which are poorly understood.”
The Euclid STAR Prize was established in 2017 to acknowledge work in different areas of activity. Euclid Consortium members can nominate their colleagues and collaborators for any one of seven award categories.
Launched in July 2023, Euclid is mapping the Universe with unprecedented precision and accuracy. By examining more than one billion galaxies over six years, this groundbreaking space telescope aims to explore two of astronomy’s biggest mysteries: dark matter and dark energy.
The recent release of the first survey data from the Euclid satellite, one million miles from Earth, has helped UK scientists shed light on how mysterious forces shaped the evolution of the Universe and furthered understanding of the cosmos.
Image credit: ESA/Euclid/Euclid Consortium/NASA, image processing by J.-C. Cuillandre (CEA Paris-Saclay), G. Anselmi
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