Resting on a mountain in the Chilean Andes, a 570-megapixel telescope camera is on the hunt for information about dark energy in the universe.
The $40 million project, dubbed the Dark Energy Survey, has already captured starlight from galaxies eight billion light years away, and will continue to survey the universe for the next five years.
Built by scientists and engineers from three continents, the camera’s field of view is one of the largest in the world for ground-based images. The vast field of view is able to record an area of the sky 20 times the size of the moon seen from earth, in one image.
The camera will be able to capture light from over 100,000 galaxies, and is very sensitive to light in the red part of the visible spectrum. It will also be used to look at and measure roughly 300 million galaxies and 4000 supernovae.
The Dark Energy Survey is the largest galaxy survey ever conducted, and its goal is to investigate the dynamics of the universe.
Gravity is known to pull objects together and should cause the deceleration of the expansion of the universe; the expansion of the universe, however, is accelerating. Dark energy one hypothesis as to the cause of this acceleration.
Twenty-three different scientific institutions worldwide funded the project including the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and firms from Brazil, the UK, Spain, Germany and Switzerland.
Source: Science Daily
