Measuring the shape of millions of galaxies.
© 2011 EPFL
Researchers from the laboratory of astrophysics (Prof. Georges Meylan) have won part of an astronomical image analysis challenge, GREAT10 (GRavitational lEnsing Accuracy Testing, 2010), aimed at testing algorithms to measure the shape of millions of galaxies in projection on the plane of the sky.
Such techniques will allow astrophysicists to measure the tiny optical distorsions seen in the image of distant galaxies due to the gravitational field of massive structures in their foreground. Calibrating and testing new image processing algorithms to remove accurately instrumental effects from the data is a crucial step in the analysis process. The laboratory of astrophysics of EPFL has now gained well recognized expertise in this field, at the connection between astrophysics, cosmology and image processing. Applications of the algortihms developped at EPFL are planned in view of the analysis of the images obtained by the ESA
EUCLID satellite (http://actu.epfl.ch/news/expansion-of-the-universe/).
The team of researchers is composed of Marc Gentile, Guldariya Nurbaeva, Frédéric Courbin, Malte Tewes and Nicolas Cantale.
Link to GREAT10: http://www.greatchallenges.info/