Konferenzservice Mandl

Zusammenfassung: Euclid is an ESA mission to map the dark Universe. It has been selected in 2007 for study as one of the candidates of ESAs Cosmic Vision programme for the medium size mission (M1) launch slot planned for 2017.

The mission will investigate the distance-redshift relationship and the evolution of cosmic struc¬tures by measuring shapes and redshifts of galaxies and clusters of galaxies. The statistical study of structures in a large volume of the Universe requires a survey of the entire extra¬galactic sky. The mission is centred on weak lensing and baryonic acoustic oscillations, two powerful and robust probes of the Dark Universe.

Euclid will address key fundamental cosmological questions. Is dark energy merely a cosmological constant, as first discussed by Einstein, or is it a new kind of field that evolves dynamically with the expansion of the universe? Alternatively, is dark energy instead a manifestation of a break-down of General Relativity and deviations from the law of gravity? What are the nature and properties of dark matter? What are the initial conditions which seed the formation of cosmic structure?

The mission will yield an unprecedented astronomy legacy for the 21st century: diffraction limited visual and NIR maps of the entire extragalactic sky with spectroscopic redshifts for a large fraction of the galaxies.