Professor Grzegorz Pietrzyński from the Astronomical Observatory of the University of Warsaw was granted the ERC Advanced Grant. It is 12th prestigious award for the UW.

“A sub-percent distance scale from binaries and Cepheids” is the title of Prof. Grzegorz Pietrzyński project. Scientist will be cooperating with the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in France as well as the Universidad de Concepcion in Chile.

The project will produce a decisive step towards improving the accuracy of the Hubble constant as determined from the Cepheid-SN Ia method to 1%, by using 28 extremely rare eclipsing binary systems in the LMC which offer the potential to determine their distances to 1%.

Awarded research bears strong synergy to the Gaia mission by providing the best checks on possible systematic uncertainties on Gaia parallaxes with 200 binary systems whose distances Prof. Grzegorz Pietrzyński and other researchers will measure to 1-2%. They will provide two unique tools for 1-3 % distance determinations to individual objects in a volume of 1 Mpc, being competitive to Gaia already at a distance of 1 kpc from the Sun.

The scientist has applied for 2,4 milion euro.

The European Research Council was established by the European Commission. The ERC Advanced Grant is designed to researchers with established reputation as independent researchers.