How did the dwarf galaxies we can observe today come into being? The answer is to be found in the very earliest phases of the life of the universe. To reconstruct this cosmic history spanning more than 13 billion years, the Sprout project (Small Protogalaxies Revealing Origins and Unfolding into Today's Dwarfs), led by Thales Gutcke, has just been awarded an ERC Starting Grant in the Physical Sciences and Engineering panel.
Thanks to European Research Council funding of 1.67 million euros spread over five years, Gutcke will move from the Institute for Astronomy at the University of Hawai'i to INAF – Astronomical Observatory of Trieste, with the project shared with the University of Trieste. The resources will make it possible not only to expand the Trieste computing centre, but also to build a new research group with the hiring of three post-doctoral researchers and two PhD students.
"The first galaxies in the universe were, by necessity, dwarf galaxies, and they were the seeds from which the population of galaxies we see today began to develop," the researcher explains. "Sprout will develop state-of-the-art cosmological simulations capable of reaching unprecedented resolution, in order to model these phenomena directly and in detail, going beyond the approximations used so far in large-scale simulations."
The goal is to build a bridge between the galaxies detected at cosmic dawn by the James Webb Space Telescope and their descendants in the local universe, observed by flagship missions and surveys such as Euclid, DESI and Rubin/LSST. By making these objects "evolve" through computer calculations, Sprout will reveal how the first seeds turned into the various dwarf galaxies we observe today.
"Dwarf galaxies may be small, but it is inside them," Gutcke points out, "that some of the fundamental processes of galaxy formation take place: stars explode as supernovae, galaxies expel and accrete gas, the first heavy elements are forged, dense stellar clusters form, and black holes are born and grow. Sprout's simulations will model these processes at unprecedented resolution, resolving the physics that larger-scale simulations can only approximate."
The Sprout funding falls under the European Research Council's ERC Starting Grant 2026 call, which awarded a total of 705 million euros to 421 high-level early-career researchers across Europe, against a record 4,807 applications (with a success rate of 8.8 per cent). The winners represent 52 different nationalities: as many as 50 are Italian, while 22 researchers chose a university or research institution in Italy as the host for their project. According to ERC estimates, the funding awarded will help create more than 2,700 new jobs in research teams.
The award to Thales Gutcke also underlines the effectiveness of policies aimed at attracting talent from overseas: this year 21 winners (5 per cent of the total) come from non-European institutions, 20 of them from the United States.
"Finding out that Sprout had been funded was an almost imperceptible moment, contained in a simple email that arrived early in the morning," the researcher comments. "Now it is turning into a new chapter. My family and I are packing our bags to move from Hawai'i to Trieste, practically to the other side of the world. At the same time, though, we are moving closer to my husband's family — he is Italian. And the science tells exactly the same story: starting from these very first, very small galaxies and watching them grow into the dwarf galaxies we still observe around us today. On top of that, I will have the opportunity to build an entire research group at INAF from scratch, and that too is a story that starts small and becomes big."
Source: INAF Press Office, Media INAF, 3 September 2026 — https://www.media.inaf.it/2026/09/03/erc-sprout-16-milioni-euro-galassie-nane/
DOI: 10.20371/INAF/2724-2641/1785242
