MessageToEagle.com - World's most sophisticated digital camera is a powerful sky-mapping machine
ever created.
It's a long-awaited device that will help unravel one of the universe’s most compelling mysteries and with this instrument scientists
will be able to go back about 6, 7 billion years, approximatelyt three-quarters to half-way back to the Big Bang.
With this device, about the size of a phone booth, astronomers and physicists will probe the mystery of dark energy,
the force they believe is causing the universe to expand faster and faster.
Eight billion years ago, rays of light from distant galaxies began their long journey to our planet Earth.
That ancient starlight, captured and recorded for the first time by the newly-constructed Dark Energy Camera,
may contribute to solving one of the biggest mysteries in physics – why the expansion of the
universe is speeding up.
Most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created. Credits: Fermilab
“The achievement of first light through the Dark Energy Camera begins a significant new era in our exploration of
the cosmic frontier,” said James Siegrist, associate director of science for high energy physics with the U.S.
Department of Energy.
“The results of this survey will bring us closer to understanding the mystery of dark energy,
and what it means for the universe.”
“The Dark Energy Survey will help us understand why the expansion of the universe is accelerating, rather than slowing
due to gravity,” said Brenna Flaugher, project manager and scientist at Fermilab. “It is extremely satisfying to see
the efforts of all the people involved in this project finally come together.”
The Dark Energy Camera is the most powerful survey instrument of its kind, able to see light from over 100,000
galaxies up to 8 billion light years away in each snapshot.
The camera’s array of 62 charged-coupled devices has an unprecedented sensitivity to very red light, and along
with the Blanco telescope’s large light-gathering mirror (which spans 13 feet across), will allow scientists
from around the world to pursue investigations ranging from studies of asteroids in our own Solar System
to the understanding of the origins and the fate of the universe.
A look inside the Dark Energy Camera shows the 74 blue-tinged sensors that detect light. The camera
will survey distant, faint galaxies to learn more about dark energy. Credits: Reidar Hahn/Fermilab
“We’re very excited to bring the Dark Energy Camera online and make it available for the astronomical community
through NOAO's open access telescope allocation,” said Chris Smith, director of the Cerro-Tololo Inter-American
Observatory.
Zoomed-in image from the Dark Energy Camera of the center of the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae,
which lies about 17,000 light years from Earth. Credits:Dark Energy Survey Collaboration
“With it, we provide astronomers from all over the world a powerful new tool to explore the outstanding
questions of our time, perhaps the most pressing of which is the nature of dark energy.”
Scientists in the Dark Energy Survey collaboration will use the new camera to carry out the largest galaxy survey
ever undertaken, and will use that data to carry out four probes of dark energy, studying galaxy clusters, supernovae,
the large-scale clumping of galaxies and weak gravitational lensing.
This will be the first time all four of these methods will be possible in a single experiment.
Over five years, the survey will create detailed color images of one-eighth of the sky, or 5,000 square degrees,
to discover and measure 300 million galaxies, 100,000 galaxy clusters and 4,000 supernovae.
The Dark Energy Survey is expected to begin in December, after the camera is fully tested, and will take advantage
of the excellent atmospheric conditions in the Chilean Andes to deliver pictures with the sharpest resolution seen
in such a wide-field astronomy survey. In just its first few nights of testing, the camera has already delivered
images with excellent and nearly uniform spatial resolution.
The product of eight years of planning and construction by scientists, engineers, and technicians on three continents, was
developed at the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
in Batavia, Illinois, and mounted on the Victor M. Blanco telescope at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo
Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile, which is the southern branch of the U.S. National Optical Astronomy
Observatory (NOAO)
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