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Dark Energy Survey @TheDESurvey
Apr 20
RT @astropontos:No astropontos dessa semana discutimos sobre um novo método para estimar a taxa de expansão do universo usando si… https://t.co/7doq5AeW9m

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Dark Energy Survey @TheDESurvey
Apr 20
RT @plazasmalagon1:It’s been an honor to meet Jim-sensei and learn from him at Peyton hall in @PU_Astro! @QuantaMagazine https://t.co/j0Iq6795pm

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Dark Energy Survey @TheDESurvey
Apr 20
RT @LSST:How do you test the lift that will move VERY heavy @LSST equipment between floors of the observatory? With barrels… https://t.co/UmKxWpw4AS

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Dark Energy Survey @TheDESurvey
Apr 18
Approaching a small black hole would tear you apart by tidal forces until you were just a string of particles being… https://t.co/51i9LhlZno

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Dark Energy Survey @TheDESurvey
Apr 18
RT @robertcnichol:.@kathy_romer celebrates her birthday with a @NOAOSouth cake @theDESurvey #gettingold https://t.co/41eUpsf20b

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The Dark Energy Survey
3 days ago
Approaching a small black hole would tear you apart by tidal forces until you were just a string of particles being sucked in. We call this spaghettification. Bon appétit! #DarkBites

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The Dark Energy Survey
5 days ago
#DESimages (credit: Bhuvnesh Jain and Erin Sheldon) ... See MoreSee Less
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The Dark Energy Survey
1 week ago
#DESimages (credit: Joe Zuntz and Erin Sheldon) ... See MoreSee Less
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The Dark Energy Survey shared a post.
2 weeks ago
Congratulations to the many collaborators of the Event Horizon Telescope Project for this historic accomplishment!You are looking at the first ever image of a black hole, captured by the Event Horizon Telescope Project. Within the dark spot is the black hole—a place so gravitationally dense nothing can escape from it, not even light. The orange halos surrounding the hole are hot gas emissions, swirling around it under the influence of the strong gravity near the event horizon—the point past which not even light can escape before falling into the void.

To capture this image, a network of telescopes around the globe coordinated efforts to observe the black hole that sits at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster, 55 million light-years from Earth. This effort to create an “Earth-sized” telescope resulted in five petabytes of data (“the equivalent of billions of cat videos” according to EHT researchers) which researchers refined to create this historic first image.

The National Science Foundation played a pivotal role in this discovery by funding individual investigators, interdisciplinary scientific teams and radio astronomy research facilities since the inception of EHT. Over the last two decades, NSF has directly funded more than $28 million in EHT research, the largest commitment of resources for the project

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The Dark Energy Survey
2 weeks ago
The biggest mystery of studying the cosmic web with DES is why my code takes so darn long to run. Actually, it isn't a mystery when you analyze 18 million galaxies! #DEST4TD

Thanks to Brandon Buncher (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) for today's DES thought for the day!

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Supernovae, Dark Energy, and the Fate of Our Universe

April 5, 2019 12:00 pm

What’s the eventual fate of our universe? Is spacetime destined to continue to expand forever? Will it fly apart, tearing even atoms into bits? Or will it crunch back in on itself? New results from Dark Energy Survey supernovae address these and other questions. At present, the fabric of our universe is expanding — and not only that, but the its expansion is accelerating. To explain this phenomenon, we invoke what’s known as dark energy — an unknown form of energy that exists everywhere and exerts a negative pressure, driving the expansion. Since this idea was first proposed, we’ve conducted decades of research to better understand what dark energy is, how much of it there is, and how it influences our universe.

Measuring Distance In Space Using The Dark Energy Survey Portal

March 28, 2019 12:00 pm

Distance measurement is an important challenge in astronomy. Between the parallax of nearby stars and the redshift of the most distant galaxies, there are a lot of steps. With the Dark Energy rush, several large astronomical surveys are trying to understand the accelerated expansion of the universe. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) has just completed its observations last January, cataloging hundreds of millions of galaxies. Obtaining precise distance measurements of such a large number of galaxies is a hard task. To address this problem, photometric redshifts (photo-z’s) have been largely used by the astronomical community. Although less accurate than spectroscopic ones, they are cheaper and faster (regarding the number of galaxies measured per exposure time) and, hence, allow observations to go beyond signal-to-noise ratio limits of spectroscopic observations.

Cosmic fireworks in the clouds: Volunteer detectives sought for Magellanic Clouds Cluster Search

March 27, 2019 12:00 pm

Caught in a cosmic dance, our nearest neighbor galaxies, the Magellanic Clouds, are cartwheeling and circling each other as they fall toward our galaxy, the Milky Way. The gravitational interaction between the Clouds sparks cosmic fireworks—bursts of star formation as new clusters of stars flame on. How many and what kind of star clusters have been born this way over the history of the Clouds? A new project, the Local Group Cluster Search, invites citizen scientists to help find out! In contrast to the earliest studies of star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds, which used images captured on glass photographic plates, SMASH was carried out using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), a 570-megapixel digital camera on the Blanco 4-m telescope at National Science Foundation's (NSF) Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Using DECam, astronomers obtained images that not only cover the full extent of the two galaxies but also are more sensitive to faint stars than any previous wide-field optical survey of the Clouds.

Beyond the Dark Energy Survey – Illinois astronomers look to the future after mapping the skies

February 12, 2019 12:00 am

For the past six years, the Department of Astronomy and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois have been closely involved with one of the most sensitive and comprehensive surveys of distant galaxies ever performed. Now that the survey is complete, they will analyze the vast amounts of data that’s been collected to better understand our universe. In January, the Dark Energy Survey (DES) stopped collecting data after scanning a quarter of the southern skies and cataloguing hundreds of millions of distant galaxies. Now, astronomers anticipate that they will continue to refine this data for use by scientists into 2021. “DES is leading the way for data science intensive research at Illinois,” said Leslie Looney, chair of the Department of Astronomy. “This is really the beginning of a new revolution in astronomy— using a large amount of data to do fundamental astronomical science. We are developing new techniques that better utilize state-of-the-art computer science methods to analyze galaxies, stars, and many other types of objects.”

The Poetry Of the Dark Energy Survey

February 9, 2019 12:00 am

Listen here: https://player.fm/series/the-365-days-of-astronomy-the-daily-podcast-of-the-international-year-of-astronomy-2009-49427/noao-the-poetry-of-the-dark-energy-survey The Dark Energy Survey started in 2013 to map dark energy over 5000 square degrees of sky. Writer and poet Amy Catanzano visited Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory during the Dark Energy Survey. In this podcast, Amy discusses her work in quantum poetics, her experience with the Dark Energy Survey and shares some of her poetry. Bio: Rob Sparks is a Science Education Specialist at the National Optical Astronomy Observatory. A lifelong astronomy enthusiast, he earned a B.A. in physics at Grinnell College and his M.S. at Michigan State University. He taught high school physics, math and astronomy for 11 years at schools on St. Croix, Florida and Wisconsin. He spent the 2001-2002 school year working on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey as a recipient of the Fermilab Teacher Fellowship. He spent the summer of 2003 at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory as part of the Research Experience for Teachers. He has been working as a NASA Astrophysics Ambassador since 2002. He was a member of the Galileoscope Working Group for the International Year of Astronomy. Amy Catanzano is a writer and poet who teaches at Wake Forest University. She works extensively on poetry involving different scientific disciplines and has published three books of poetry

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