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.
Dark Energy Camera
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.
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.
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 Carnegie Science, July 16, 2018: The Dark Energy Camera was one of the instruments used to make the finds.
From Astronomy, Feb. 22, 2018: The supernova, dubbed DES16C2nm, was first detected back in August 2016 by the Dark Energy Survey, which is currently mapping several hundred million galaxies in order to learn more about the mysterious force known as dark energy.
From Newsweek, Feb. 21, 2018: DES162nm was first spotted in August 2016 using the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The investigations were part of an international collaboration known as the Dark Energy Survey—a project designed to map hundreds of millions of galaxies in a search for the mysterious force that is thought to be behind the accelerating expansion of the universe.
Local communities named newly discovered stellar streams for bodies of water close to home.
Scientists on the Dark Energy Survey announced the public release of their first three years of data. This first major release of data includes information on about 400 million astronomical objects.