dark energy

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 Marianne TV (France), April 21, 2021: An interview on the Muon g-2 experiment result with Laurent Lellouch, CNRS research director at the Theoretical Physics Center and the Universe Physics Institute.

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.

From IG Último Segundo (Brazil), March 7, 2021: Fermilab researcher Marcelle Soares-Santos was included in this International Women’s Day story for her studies on dark matter and dark energy.

From Forbes, Feb. 22, 2021: Fermilab scientist Don Lincoln explains how modern cosmology imagines our universe is an astronomical confection with three primary ingredients: ordinary matter, dark matter and dark energy.

From UChicago News, Feb. 12, 2021: Fermilab scientist Yuanyuan Zhang discusses the implications of the studies she led on intracluster light using Dark Energy Survey data, which may include a new way of measuring dark matter.

From Universe Today, Feb. 3, 2021: Recent published results from the Dark Energy Survey point to intracluster light — feeble light from rogue stars that don’t belong to a galaxy — as a potential pathway to measure dark matter. Fermilab scientist Yuanyuan Zhang contextualizes the findings.

From Super Interessante, Jan. 31, 2021: A team of researchers from Fermilab and the National Observatory in Brazil used the light of solitary stars to calculate the mass of some of the largest structures in the cosmos — galaxy clusters. In addition to taking the most detailed measurement ever published of intracluster light, the team’s new method of measurement can help further investigate dark matter.

From New Scientist, Jan. 25, 2021: The Big Bang left us the universe — and a major set of mysteries around antimatter, dark matter, dark energy, and cosmic inflation. While the Large Hadron Collider looks at what the laws of physics were like a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang, Dan Hooper, head of theoretical astrophysics at Fermilab, thinks the answers to these puzzles may depend on better understanding that first fraction of a second — even closer to the universe’s beginning.

Rubin Observatory will bring new capabilities to the studies of dark matter and dark energy.