According to a September 3 news release from University of Pennsylvania, over the next five years, the world's most powerful digital camera will capture images of the night sky, to assist an international team of scientists in answering vital questions about the universe. The project is known as the Dark Energy Survey, which officially commenced on August 31, and it is the apex of over 10 years of planning, production, and testing by 25 organizations in six countries.
"Preparing for this day has been a long road, but the road ahead is even more exciting," said Bhuvnesh Jain, professor in the University of Pennsylvania School of Arts and Sciences' Department of Physics and Astronomy, one of the participating institutions. "We're very much looking forward to seeing our first data. Every week images of several million distant galaxies will be recorded by our camera and processed by our software. The cumulative analysis of a full season of data will lead to novel results in multiple branches of cosmology."
The Dark Energy Survey will methodically map one-eighth of the sky in record detail, with the goal of discovering why the expansion of the universe is speeding up, rather than slowing down due to gravity. The scientists will examine the mystery of dark energy, the force thought to be causing that acceleration.
"With the start of the survey, the work of more than 200 collaborators is coming to fruition," said DES Director Josh Frieman of the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. "It's an exciting time in cosmology, when we can use observations of the distant universe to tell us about the fundamental nature of matter, energy, space and time."
The primary tool of the survey is the Dark Energy Camera, a 570-megapixel digital camera built at Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, mounted on the 4-meter Victor M. Blanco telescope at the National Science Foundation's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in the Andes Mountains in Chile. The camera boasts five precisely shaped lenses that together provide sharp images over its entire field of view. The Dark Energy Camera is the most powerful survey instrument of its kind, capable of imaging light from more than 100,000 galaxies up to 8 billion light years away in each photograph.
The Dark Energy Survey will employ four techniques to probe dark energy: totaling galaxy clusters, computing supernovae, studying the pliability of light through gravitational lensing, and investigating patterns in the distribution of galaxies.
The collected data will be processed at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois in Urbana, and will then be delivered to collaboration scientists and the public.
