On the occasion of the 2026 edition of the International Day of Human Space Flight, the University of Trieste joins the international scientific community in celebrating the value of space exploration as a collective endeavor of humanity, emphasizing the importance of cooperation among countries and the crucial role of scientific progress for the global future.

In a period marked by intense international conflicts, looking toward space offers an opportunity to rediscover a broader perspective: research in the space field reminds us of our place in a vast, complex, and still largely mysterious cosmos. It is precisely this shared dimension of knowledge that continues to unite researchers and institutions around the world, beyond divisions.

Prof. Stefano Borgani, professor of Astrophysics and Cosmology, explains UniTS’s commitment to this fascinating field of research.

“Observing the Universe with satellites from space makes it possible to remove the ‘opaque veil’ of the atmosphere, achieving a clarity in our understanding of cosmic structures that is difficult to obtain with ground-based telescopes. One such space telescope, Euclid of the European Space Agency (ESA), was launched on July 1, 2023, and is now providing an overview of the structure of the Universe on scales of several billion light-years, with a level of detail never reached before. By measuring with great precision the distance of tens of millions of galaxies and the effects of gravitational lensing for over a billion galaxies, Euclid will make it possible to address fundamental questions concerning our understanding of the Universe. A group of researchers from the Department of Physics of our University, in collaboration with colleagues from INAF – Astronomical Observatory of Trieste and SISSA, are active members of the Euclid Consortium, a collaboration of more than two thousand researchers, mostly European, with a significant component of colleagues from the United States and Canada. Researchers from our University play a key role, which also translates into responsibilities for coordinating working groups, in the study of the distribution of galaxies and galaxy clusters, also using advanced statistical ‘Machine Learning’ methods and high-performance computing infrastructures to create ‘digital twins’ of the Universe observed by Euclid. The ultimate goal of these analyses is to help shed light on the nature of Dark Matter and Dark Energy, on the fundamental laws governing the evolution of the Universe, as well as on the conditions that determined its very origin.”

Through the active contribution of its researchers in major international collaborations, the University of Trieste reaffirms its commitment to building shared knowledge capable of overcoming borders and tensions, and of providing us with a more aware and unified vision of our place in the Universe.

PHOTO: rendering Euclid. Credit: Thales Alenia Space