DES

The 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time has officially started, marking the beginning of a new era in astronomy and astrophysics.

After 25 years of planning, six years of data collection and six more years of analysis, scientists have published a portion of the final results of the Dark Energy Survey — the largest, most comprehensive survey of its kind — yielding the tightest constraints to date on models of our universe’s expansion.

Dark Energy Survey researchers have published their most comprehensive results to date of the Universe’s expansion over the past six billion years in Physical Research D.

The DES collaboration recently released six years worth of data collected by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam). The analysis represents the first time the four separate methods of studying dark energy have been united as one.

The Dark Energy Camera, designed specifically for the Dark Energy Survey and built and tested at Fermilab, captured an image assembled from a total of 28 hours of observations. The image gives a tantalizing hint of how intracluster light will be revealed by the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

A research team as part of the the Dark Energy Survey collaboration used artificial intelligence to research dark energy more precisely from a map of dark and visible matter in the Universe covering the last seven billion years. The new AI technique allowed researchers to use much more information from the maps than would be possible with the previous method.

The Dark Energy Survey has measured the BAO scale when the universe was half its present age with an accuracy of 2%, the most accurate determination yet at such an early epoch. It is the first time an imaging-only measurement is competitive with large spectroscopy campaigns specifically designed to detect this signal.

The most recent results from Dark Energy Survey of over 1,500 supernovas taken by the by the DECam calls the standard model of cosmology into question.

The new Dark Energy Survey year five results used machine learning to obtain a new measurement that offers insights into the density of the mysterious force driving the Universe’s expansion. The results were presented recently at the 243rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society meeting. What does this all mean? Don Lincoln explains.

In the culmination of a decade’s worth of effort, the DES collaboration of scientists analyzed an unprecedented sample of more than 1,500 supernovae classified using machine learning. They placed the strongest constraints on the expansion of the universe ever obtained with the DES supernova survey. While consistent with the current standard cosmological model, the results do not rule out a more complex theory that the density of dark energy in the universe could have varied over time.