After less than a year of data taking, DESI has already mapped out more galaxies than all previous 3D surveys combined — and it’s just getting started.
cosmology
Physicists are revisiting what they previously assumed about how dark matter interacts with itself.
Just over 40 years ago, a new theory about the early universe provided a way to tackle multiple cosmological conundrums at once.
What if human analysis, combined with machine learning, could advance the study of the universe? The U.S. Department of Energy awarded Fermilab scientist Brian Nord a $2.5 million Early Career Research Award to explore that possibility. Nord has envisioned a new hybrid data-analysis method to undertake the project. It integrates the strengths of artificial intelligence and interpretations of statistics in ways that could potentially advance the studies of cosmology.
From Universe Today, May 30, 2021: The Dark Energy Survey camera (DECam) was funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) and was built and tested at Fermilab. The DES took place over 6 years from 2013 to 2019, and looked at over 1/8th of the night sky for a total of 758 night
The Dark Energy Survey collaboration has created the largest ever maps of the distribution and shapes of galaxies, tracing both ordinary and dark matter in the universe out to a distance of over 7 billion light years. The analysis, which includes the first three years of data from the survey, is consistent with predictions from the current best model of the universe, the standard cosmological model. Nevertheless, there remain hints from DES and other experiments that matter in the current universe is a few percent less clumpy than predicted.
DESI will capture and study the light from tens of millions of galaxies and other distant objects to better understand our universe and the properties of dark energy. The formal start of DESI’s five-year survey follows a four-month trial run of its custom instrumentation that captured 4-million spectra of galaxies — more than the combined output of all previous spectroscopic surveys. Fermilab has contributed multiple components to the international collaboration led by Berkeley Lab.
DUNE’s near detector, located at Fermilab, will take vital measurements of neutrino beam energy and composition before it reaches the experiment’s far detector in South Dakota. Its unmatched precision measurements will offer its own opportunities for the discovery of new physics.
From Forbes, Feb. 25, 2021: Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln writes about a supercomputer at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan that explores the history of the universe by simulating over 4,000 universes.
Higgs-boson pairs could help scientists understand the stability of our universe. The trick is finding them.