The U.S. Department of Energy awarded Guillermo Fernandez Moroni $2.5 million over 5 years to fund his project developing sensors to study the early universe. His work could enable surveying tens of thousands of distant galaxies at a time.
The Siena Galaxy Atlas will be a tool for research into how galaxies form and evolve, gravitational waves, dark matter and the structure of our universe.
Astrophysicist Maria Vincenzi won the award for her thesis, which created a process for preventing Dark Energy Survey data from being thrown out due to contamination from unusable supernovae.
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, travel bans and stay-at-home orders meant astrophysicists collaborating on the Dark Energy Survey needed to find a new way to conduct their observations using the Dark Energy Camera.