The project wanted to build on the effort toward a precise description of galaxy clustering on very large scales, and to explore innovative and promising ways to combine the analyses of galaxy and radio surveys.
1. Observations of the distribution of galaxies in the sky and its evolution is one of the main objectives for astrophysics, currently and for the next few years. These observations will allow us to study and finally understand better how gravity works and to explore the physics acting during the first moments after the beginning of the Universe as we know it. However, in order to use these data in a scientifically optimal way, we need the appropriate, precise, mathematical and physical modeling. Until very recently, this modeling was developed for the small experiments that started the field decades ago. Therefore, future experiments and analyses require an improvement of such modeling for galaxy clustering. One of the objectives of this project was to develop such modeling for two statistical tools to analyse such observable, called the power spectrum and the bispectrum.
2. In the next decade, most of European astrophysics investments will be in two large experiments: Euclid and the SKA (see below). The expertise of the team assembled with this MSC grant was ideal to find ways to combine observations from these two future experiments, and develop creative ways to study the Universe using the combined full power of them, rather than just perform separate studies. We demonstrated that some studies (including for example the way gravity works, the nature of black holes) can be performed only when we combine different experiments.
This project has been extremely important to maximize the scientific outout of major astrophysics experiments funded by the european union.
Moreover, the studies developed during this grant opened the way to combine galaxy surveys with gravitational wave interferometers. The next large european investment in physics will be in gravtational waves (with the Einstein Telescope effort and the planning of the space interferometer LISA), therefore the innovative ideas developed during the COSMOFLAGS grant will be of fundamental importance in the next two decades.
