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.
Dark Energy Camera
From CNN, June 3, 2021: Fermilab’s Don Lincoln covers the capabilities of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, in mapping the structure of the entire cosmos.
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.
A physicist making great advances in particle detector technology, Estrada is recognized by the American Physical Society Division of Particles and Fields for his creation and development of novel applications for CCD technology that probe wide-ranging areas of particle physics, including cosmology, dark matter searches, neutrino detection and quantum imaging.
From NOIRLab, Feb. 8, 2021: The Dark Energy Camera, originally used to complete the Dark Energy Survey, has taken the most detailed photo of Messier 83, also known as the Southern Pinwheel galaxy. (In DECam’s second act, scientists can apply for time to use it to collect data that is then made publicly available.) In all, 163 DECam exposures went into creating this image.
From Forbes, Dec. 27, 2020: Astronomers have long known that the matter that they’ve seen is less than half of the atomic matter that exists. Several hypotheses have been advanced as to where that matter could be found. Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln describes how a team of astronomers has combined a series of astronomical facilities, including the Dark Energy Camera, to look for a filament of gas connecting two galaxy clusters. They were able to image the largest and hottest filament recorded to date.
A collaboration of the Americas aims to take the first pioneering images of low-energy neutrinos and provide new data to shed light on the mysterious identity of dark matter.
From UChicago News, Feb. 6, 2020: Fermilab and University of Chicago scientist Brad Benson and colleagues use a different method to calculate the masses of distant galaxies: the polarization, or orientation, of the light left over from the moments after the Big Bang. In doing so, they demonstrate how to “weigh” galaxy clusters using light from the earliest moments of the universe — a new method that could help shed light on dark matter, dark energy and other mysteries of the cosmos.
When LIGO and Virgo detected the echoes that likely came from a collision between a black hole and a neutron star, dozens of physicists began a hunt for the signal’s electromagnetic counterpart.
From Listverse, May 3, 2019: The Dark Energy Camera made this list of 10 brilliant feats of scientific technology, along with LIGO, the Pierre Auger Observatory and the Large Hadron Collider.