The current standard model of cosmology successfully describes a variety of measurements, but the nature of its main ingredients, dark matter and dark energy, remains unknown. Euclid is a medium-class mission in the Cosmic Vision 2015–2025 programme of the European Space Agency (ESA) that will provide high-resolution optical imaging, as well as near-infrared imaging and spectroscopy, over about 14 000 deg² of extragalactic sky. In addition to accurate weak lensing and clustering measurements that probe structure formation over half of the age of the Universe, its primary probes for cosmology, these exquisite data will enable a wide range of science. This paper provides a high-level overview of the mission, summarising the survey characteristics, the various data-processing steps, and data products. We also highlight the main science objectives and expected performance.

The detection of the accelerated expansion of the Universe has been one of the major breakthroughs in modern cosmology. Several cosmological probes (Cosmic Microwave Background, Supernovae Type Ia, Baryon Acoustic Oscillations) have been studied in depth to better understand the nature of the mechanism driving this acceleration, and they are being currently pushed to their limits, obtaining remarkable constraints that allowed us to shape the standard cosmological model. In parallel to that, however, the percent precision achieved has recently revealed apparent tensions between measurements obtained from different methods. These are either indicating some unaccounted systematic effects, or are pointing toward new physics. Following the development of CMB, SNe, and BAO cosmology, it is critical to extend our selection of cosmological probes. Novel probes can be exploited to validate results, control or mitigate systematic effects, and, most importantly, to increase the accuracy and robustness of our results. This review is meant to provide a state-of-art benchmark of the latest advances in emerging “beyond-standard” cosmological probes. We present how several different methods can become a key resource for observational cosmology. In particular, we review cosmic chronometers, quasars, gamma-ray bursts, standard sirens, lensing time-delay with galaxies and clusters, cosmic voids, neutral hydrogen intensity mapping, surface brightness fluctuations, stellar ages of the oldest objects, secular redshift drift, and clustering of standard candles. The review describes the method, systematics, and results of each probe in a homogeneous way, giving the reader a clear picture of the available innovative methods that have been introduced in recent years and how to apply them. The review also discusses the potential synergies and complementarities between the various probes, exploring how they will contribute to the future of modern cosmology.

The joint detection of gravitational waves (GWs) and electromagnetic radiation from the binary neutron star (BNS) merger GW170817 has provided unprecedented insight into a wide range of physical processes: heavy element synthesis via the r-process; the production of relativistic ejecta; the equation of state of neutron stars and the nature of the merger remnant; the binary coalescence timescale; and a measurement of the Hubble constant via the “standard siren” technique. In detail, all of these results depend on the distance to the host galaxy of the merger event, NGC 4993. In this Letter we measure the surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) distance to NGC 4993 in the F110W and F160W passbands of the Wide Field Camera 3 Infrared Channel (WFC3/IR) on the Hubble Space Telescope (HST). For the preferred F110W passband we derive a distance modulus of ( m − M ) = 33.05 ± 0.08 ± 0.10 mag, or a linear distance d = 40.7 ± 1.4 ± 1.9 Mpc (random and systematic errors, respectively); a virtually identical result is obtained from the F160W data. This is the most precise distance to NGC 4993 available to date. Combining our distance measurement with the corrected recession velocity of NGC 4993 implies a Hubble constant H ₀ = 71.9 ± 7.1 km s⁻¹ Mpc⁻¹. A comparison of our result to the GW-inferred value of H ₀ indicates a binary orbital inclination of i ≳ 137°. The SBF technique can be applied to early-type host galaxies of BNS mergers to ∼100 Mpc with HST and possibly as far as ∼300 Mpc with the James Webb Space Telescope, thereby helping to break the inherent distance-inclination degeneracy of the GW data at distances where many future BNS mergers are likely to be detected.

Using deep, high-resolution optical imaging from the Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey, we study the properties of nuclear star clusters (NSCs) in a sample of nearly 400 quiescent galaxies in the core of Virgo with stellar masses 10⁵ ≲ / ≲ 10¹². The nucleation fraction reaches a peak value f _n ≈ 90% for ≈ 10⁹ galaxies and declines for both higher and lower masses, but nuclei populate galaxies as small as ≈ 5 × 10⁵ . Comparison with literature data for nearby groups and clusters shows that at the low-mass end nucleation is more frequent in denser environments. The NSC mass function peaks at M _NSC ≈ 7 × 10⁵ , a factor 3–4 times larger than the turnover mass for globular clusters (GCs). We find a nonlinear relation between the stellar masses of NSCs and those of their host galaxies, with a mean nucleus-to-galaxy mass ratio that drops to M _NSC/M _⋆ ≈ 3.6 × 10⁻³ for ≈ 5 × 10⁹ galaxies. Nuclei in both more and less massive galaxies are much more prominent: at the low-mass end, where nuclei are nearly 50% as massive as their hosts. We measure an intrinsic scatter in NSC masses at a fixed galaxy stellar mass of 0.4 dex, which we interpret as evidence that the process of NSC growth is significantly stochastic. At low galaxy masses we find a close connection between NSCs and GC systems, including very similar occupation distributions and comparable total masses. We discuss these results in the context of current dissipative and dissipationless models of NSC formation.

We describe a program to measure surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) distances to galaxies observed in the Next Generation Virgo Cluster Survey (NGVS), a photometric imaging survey covering 104 deg² of the Virgo cluster in the u*, g, i, and z bandpasses with the Canada–France–Hawaii Telescope. We describe the selection of the sample galaxies, the procedures for measuring the apparent i-band SBF magnitude , and the calibration of the absolute as a function of observed stellar population properties. The multiband NGVS data set provides multiple options for calibrating the SBF distances, and we explore various calibrations involving individual color indices as well as combinations of two different colors. Within the color range of the present sample, the two-color calibrations do not significantly improve the scatter with respect to wide-baseline, single-color calibrations involving u*. We adopt the calibration as a reference for the present galaxy sample, with an observed scatter of 0.11 mag. For a few cases that lack good u* photometry, we use an alternative relation based on a combination of and colors, with only a slightly larger observed scatter of 0.12 mag. The agreement of our measurements with the best existing distance estimates provides confidence that our measurements are accurate. We present a preliminary catalog of distances for 89 galaxies brighter than B _T ≈ 13.0 mag within the survey footprint, including members of the background M and W Clouds at roughly twice the distance of the main body of the Virgo cluster. The extension of the present work to fainter and bluer galaxies is in progress.

We measure surface brightness fluctuation (SBF) magnitudes in the F814W filter and (g ₄₇₅ – I ₈₁₄) colors for nine bright early-type Fornax cluster galaxies imaged with the Hubble Space Telescope Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS). The goal is to achieve the first systematic SBF calibration for the ACS/F814W bandpass. Because of its much higher throughput, F814W is more efficient for SBF studies of distant galaxies than the ACS/F850LP bandpass that has been used to study nearby systems. Over the color range spanned by the sample galaxies, 1.06 < (g ₄₇₅ – I ₈₁₄) < 1.32 (AB mag), the dependence of SBF magnitude on (g ₄₇₅ – I ₈₁₄) is linear to a good approximation, with slope ~2. When the F850LP SBF distance measurements from the ACS Fornax Cluster Survey are used to derive absolute magnitudes, the dependence on (g ₄₇₅ – I ₈₁₄) becomes extremely tight, with a slope of 1.8 ± 0.2 and a scatter of 0.03 mag. The small observed scatter indicates both that the estimated random errors are correct and that the intrinsic deviations from the SBF-color relation are strongly correlated between the F814W and F850LP bandpasses, as expected. The agreement with predictions from stellar population models is good, both in slope and zero point, indicating that our mean Fornax distance of 20 Mpc is accurate. The models predict curvature in the relation beyond the color limits of our sample; thus, the linear calibration should not be extrapolated naively. In the appendices, we reconsider the Tonry ground-based and Jensen NICMOS SBF distance catalogs; we provide a correction formula to ameliorate the small apparent bias in the former and the offset needed to make the latter consistent with other SBF studies. We also tabulate two new SBF distances to galaxies observed in the ACS Virgo Cluster Survey.