dark energy

From Kathimerini (Greece), June 14, 2021: A multinational team of 400 researchers from 25 research centers in seven countries announced the results of the DES study that looked at 226 million galaxies and thousands of supernova explosions. The DES measurements, like those of other similar galactic surveys, informed us that the current universe is less dense than our model predicts.

From The Florida News Times, May 28, 2021: A highly accurate analysis of the DES data from the first three years of the study, show hints from previous DES data and other important experiments in the universe today are a few percent less than expected. The Dark Energy Survey Camera (DECam) used in the survey was specially designed for the Dark Energy Survey, and was funded by the Department of Energy (DOE) and built and tested at DOE’s Fermilab.

A starry night sky with purple diagonal stripe from lower left to upper right corner above an observatory lit up in bright red. A shadow of a building or facility is in the lower right corner.

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.

From the University of Chicago, May 21, 2021: Long-time University of Chicago professor of astronomy and astrophysics, Richard Kron created the Sloan Digital Sky Survey which set the stage for the Dark Energy Survey. Although he is retiring this year after 40 years of mapping the universe, he plans on staying on as director of the Dark Energy Survey.

A tessellated image of a white cap with a blue dot on the right edge, with shadow surrounding. This image is tessellated many times. A single cap, center right, is different: It has a white dot with a white concentric circle around it on top. No blue.

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.

From Jumbo News, March 31, 2021: Fermilab’s Josh Frieman, Tom Diehl, Antonella Palmese, and Rich Kron as part of the Dark Energy Survey collaboration, have completed scanning a quarter of the southern skies for six years and cataloguing hundreds of millions of distant galaxies.