astrophysics

From Nature Reviews Physics, Jan. 28, 2019: The Dark Energy Survey completed its six-year-mission to map more than 300 million distant galaxies; however, an equally arduous task — analyzing the acquired 50 terabytes of data with a view to understanding the expansion of the universe — is just beginning.

From APS’s Physics, Jan. 29, 2019: On Jan. 9, a handful of researchers with the Dark Energy Survey — one of the most ambitious attempts to probe the dynamics of the universe’s expansion — headed to the control room of Chile’s Blanco Telescope. For one last time, they opened the white telescope’s dome. From their perch overlooking the red Andean Mountains, they set up for a night of observing the southern sky.

From WDCB’s First Light, Jan. 20, 2019: This WDCB interview features Fermilab scientists Brenna Flaugher and Tom Diehl talking about the final nights of the Dark Energy Survey.

From Republica, Jan. 9, 2019: Los astrofísicos que han participado en el proyecto Dark Energy Survey han finalizado hoy la toma de datos para cartografiar con un detalle sin precedentes una octava parte del cielo, tras seis años de trabajos en los que han acumulado datos de más de 300 millones de galaxias lejanas.

From Quanta, Jan. 9, 2019: Fermilab scientist Alex Drlica-Wagner comments on dark matter in this article on a paradoxical problem in astronomy: New surveys have allowed astronomers to find more satellite galaxies that had previously been hidden. At the same time, updated computer simulations predicted the existence of far fewer galaxies than their predecessors did.

The Dark Energy Camera mounted on the 4-meter Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The final day of data-taking for the Dark Energy Survey is Jan. 9.

After scanning in depth about a quarter of the southern skies for six years and cataloguing hundreds of millions of distant galaxies, the Dark Energy Survey will finish taking data on Jan. 9. DES scientists recorded data from more than 300 million distant galaxies. More than 400 scientists from over 25 institutions around the world have been involved in the project, hosted by Fermilab. The collaboration has already produced about 200 academic papers, with more to come.

From Big Think, Dec. 19, 2018: Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln comments on the theory of loop quantum gravity applied to black holes, the subject of two papers that go against the previous theories that predicted the center of a black hole to feature a point of infinite density called a singularity.