Maltese astronomers who contributed to the Euclid telescope saw some of the first fruits of their work, when the telescope brought back some of its first images earlier this month.

Among these, the work of Maltese astrophysicist Dr Ian Fenech Conti was most significant.

Dr Fenech Conti did his PhD research on the development of algorithms that are used for the optical modelling of the Euclid telescope. He did this in collaboration with Prof. Lance Miller from the University of Oxford. Dr Fenech Conti and his team won the Euclid Special Talent And Recognition (STAR) Prize as result of their work.

Professor Kristian Zarb Adami, who coordinates the work between the University of Oxford and Malta, and Professor Alessio, director of Malta Institute of Space Sciences and Astronomy (ISSA), are also involved in the Euclid project.

“After many years of hard work and collaborative achievement, the sheer joy of witnessing the first tangible images from the Euclid space telescope is indescribable. It’s a proud moment for all of us, knowing that our small but significant contributions will play an integral part in bringing the cosmos into sharper focus over the next decade,” Dr Fenech Conti said.

His work was particularly important because it focused on one of the most important aspects of Euclid’s mission: weak gravitational lensing.

“Weak gravitational lensing occurs due to the bending of light round massive objects such as clusters of galaxies,” explained the ISSA. “As the light bends through these clusters of galaxies, the shapes of background galaxies are distorted and the precise measurements of these distortions allows scientists to measure and map the dark matter distribution within these clusters of galaxies”.

The Euclid telescope is named after the ancient Greek mathematician of the same name. Over the next six years, it will observe galaxies to construct a 3D map of the cosmos.