ROMA (ITALPRESS/ECONOMIADELLOSPAZIO) – A European funding of 1,67 million euros will bring to Trieste a new group dedicated to the study of the formation of galaxies, together with new skills and an extension of the computing capacity. It is the relapse of the ERC Starting Grant 2026 assigned to Thales Gutcke for SPROUT (Small Protogalaxies Revealing Origins and Unfolding into Today’s Dwarfs), a project that will be developed at the INAF – Trieste Astronomical Observatory, with a sharing with the University of Trieste.
The investment of the European Research Council (ERC) will cover five years of activity and will allow Gutcke to move from the Institute for Astronomy of the University of Hawaii in Trieste. The resources will also serve to form a new team, through the recruitment of three post-doc researchers and two doctoral students, and to expand the centre of calculation of the Observatory.
The result thus assumes a dimension that goes beyond the single scientific project. The award brings to the INAF of Trieste a researcher from an American institution and concentrates in the centre of Trieste funding, human capital and computational capacity for a border research on the evolution of the Universe.
SPROUT aims to reconstruct the link between the first small galaxies formed in the Universe and the observable dwarf galaxies today. To do so, the project will develop high-resolution cosmological simulations, designed to directly describe phenomena that in larger scale simulations should be treated through approximations.
“The first galaxies of the universe were, by necessity, dwarf galaxies and were the seeds from which the people of galaxies we see today began to develop,” explains Gutcke. “SPROUT will develop state-of-the-art cosmological simulations, able to achieve unprecedented resolution, to directly model these phenomena in detail, overcoming the approximations used so far in large-scale simulations.”.
The research aims to create a bridge between the galaxies identified in the early Universe by the James Webb Space Telescope and their possible descendants in the local Universe, studied through observation programs such as Euclid, DESI and Rubin/LSST. The simulations will numerically evolve these systems to investigate how the first protogalassies have given rise to the different populations of Nane galaxies observed today.
It is right on the small scales that SPROUT will try to increase the level of detail of the models. In Nane galaxies, decisive processes take place to understand galactic formation: explosions of supernovae, expulsion and increase of gas, production of the first heavy elements, formation of dense stellar clusters and birth and growth of black holes.
“Nine galaxies will also be small, but it is within them that some of the most fundamental processes of galactic formation take place,” Gutcke notes. The simulations envisaged by the project, he adds, will allow to model these processes “to an unprecedented resolution”, directly facing a part of the physics that the cosmological models on a larger scale must necessarily approximate.
The availability of computational infrastructure becomes an integral part of the investment. The development of the Trieste computing centre is not only an operational support for the ERC-funded project, but increases the local resources needed to develop particularly demanding numerical simulations and train new researchers in this area.
The SPROUT case is part of a highly selective European programme. In the ERC Starting Grant 2026, the European Research Council awarded a total of EUR 705 million to 421 researchers and researchers, selected from 4,807 applications. The success rate stood at 8.8%.
The winners represent 52 nationalities. Among them are 50 Italians, while 22 researchers have chosen a university or an Italian research body to develop the project financed. According to ERC estimates, the grant set should contribute to the creation of more than 2,700 jobs in the research groups involved.
A further figure concerns the European ability to intercept skills currently active outside the continent: 21 winners, equal to 5% of the total, come from non-European institutions and 20 of them from the United States. The transfer of Gutcke from Hawaii to Trieste falls directly into this dynamic.
It is also important to read the institutional function of Starting Grant. Competitive financing does not only support an individual scientific programme: it can determine the location of research activities, promote international mobility and finance the construction of new teams at host organisations. In the case of SPROUT, this mechanism translates into five new positions between post-doc and doctoral, as well as strengthening the computational resources of INAF in Trieste.
“Discovering that SPROUT obtained funding was an almost imperceptible moment, enclosed in a simple email arrived early in the morning,” says Gutcke. “Now it is turning into a new chapter. My family and I are preparing the bags to move from Hawaii to Trieste, practically across the world.”.
The personal transfer corresponds to the construction of a new scientific structure. “I will have the opportunity to build an entire research group from scratch at the INAF,” Gutcke concludes. This is the main institutional relapse of the grant: 1,67 million euros distributed over five years transform a project of theoretical astrophysics into new research capacity located in Italy, inserting Trieste into the European network that will use simulations and great observation programs to reconstruct the evolution of the first galaxies.
– Photo Ipa Agency –
(ITALPRESS).
