cosmology

In a brightly lit clean room at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, engineers are building a car-sized digital camera for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope. When it’s ready, LSST will image almost all of the sky visible from its vantage point on a Chilean mountain, Cerro Pachón, every few nights for a decade to make an astronomical movie of unprecedented proportions. Building the LSST means solving extraordinary technological challenges.

From Cosmos, May 6, 2019: An extensive analysis of four different phenomena within the universe points the way to understanding the nature of dark energy, the Dark Energy Survey reveals.

By developing clever theories and conducting experiments with particle colliders, telescopes and satellites, physicists have been able to wind the film of the universe back billions of years—and glimpse the details of the very first moments in the history of our cosmic home. Take a (brief) journey through the early history of our cosmos.

From Science Channel’s Space’s Deepest Secrets, April 23, 2019: In an episode of this television series, Fermilab scientist Craig Hogan discusses the Holometer and his theories of the holographic universe.

The optical lenses for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument have seen their first light. Fermilab contributed key components to DESI, including the corrector barrel and its support structures, along with vital software that ensures the instrument’s 5,000 robotic positioners are precisely aligned with their celestial targets.

For The New York Times, Feb. 25, 2019: Axions? Phantom energy? Astrophysicists scramble to patch a hole in the universe, rewriting cosmic history in the process. Fermilab scientist Josh Frieman is quoted in this article.

From Scientific American, Jan. 30, 2019: Fermilab scientist Antonella Palmonese weighs in on a new method of determining the Hubble constant. The method uses data taken from the Fermilab-hosted Dark Energy Survey.

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.

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.