Welcome to the German Centre for Cosmological Lensing

At the GCCL our long-term goal is to answer one far-reaching question: what is the exact nature of the dark Universe? We are currently building the methodology and techniques needed to analyse the two major international gravitational lensing surveys of the 2020’s: LSST and Euclid in addition to the recently completed Kilo-Degree Survey. We are also developing new statistical tools to confront a range of different theories, on both dark matter and dark energy.

The German Centre for Cosmological Lensing (GCCL) was founded in November 2018 through the joint support of the European Research Council, the Max Planck Society, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Federal Ministry of Education and Research, and the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The GCCL is based in the at the Astronomical Institute at the Ruhr-Universität Bochum, with nodes at the University of Bonn, Universitat Bielefeld, the Max-Planck Institute for Astrophysics in Garching, Munich University Observatory, Heidelberg University and the University of Edinburgh.

We have four grant programmes;

We are also an international partner of the Rubin Observatory with data access rights for 20 German researchers based at GCCL nodes.

For further information about any of these schemes, please contact us.