New DarkBite! 🤩🌌Measurements of galaxy distance have uncertainty. This means our data are consistent with many possible variations of how galaxies are distributed. We use a method called Hyperrank to summarize those possibilities with just a few numbers. #darkbitesIllustration: Jessie MuirText: Ian HarrisonRead about this new Hyperrank method applied to the DES Year 3 data here: arxiv.org/abs/2109.09636 ... See MoreSee Less

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The Dark Energy Survey

2 weeks ago

Timeline PhotosSeemingly adrift and alone in a field of stars, the spiral #galaxy #NGC1398 is the feature of this #ImageOfTheWeek. Upon closer inspection, one can see that the surrounding sky is actually teeming with the smudges and whirls of distant galaxies. NGC 1398 lies roughly 65 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Fornax. This deep portrait of NGC 1398 and its neighborhood was captured by the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). The image was taken as part of the The Dark Energy Survey funded by the DOE (U.S. Department of Energy), with one of the highest-performance, wide-field CCD imagers in the world, DECam, built and tested at DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.Read more about this image on our website ow.ly/qEEg50GmDHQCredit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURAImage processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), J. Miller (Gemini Observatory/NSF’s NOIRLab), M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)#NOIRLab #NSFstories #Astronomy #Space #Universe #DiscoverTogether #Chile ... See MoreSee Less

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The Dark Energy Survey

3 weeks ago

Timeline PhotosDo you like to explore breathtaking #astronomy images for interesting details? If so, check out this zoomable image of the Fornax #galaxy cluster from the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. Appearing in the constellation Fornax (the Furnace), the Fornax Cluster is relatively nearby at only about 60 million light-years from Earth. How many galaxies do you see? How many ring galaxies can you find in this image? Some foreground #stars, which belong to our own #MilkyWay Galaxy, appear in the image as well. Enjoy exploring all the stellar details of this beautiful image! Explore more: ow.ly/CVpn50GkCls#NOIRLab #DiscoverTogether #CTIO #scienceCredit:CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURAAcknowledgment: Image processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), J. Miller (Gemini Observatory/NSF’s NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF’s NOIRLab) & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab) ... See MoreSee Less

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The Dark Energy Survey

3 weeks ago

Timeline PhotosCheck out tomorrow’s virtual #SLACPublicLecture. Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology’s Justin Myles will talk about how data collected from the The Dark Energy Survey can offer a better understanding of the influence of dark forces on the universe. stanford.io/3h1bgua ... See MoreSee Less

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The Dark Energy Survey

4 weeks ago

Timeline PhotosThe denizens of the Fornax galaxy cluster populate this image from the Dark Energy Camera located in Chile at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO), a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. In the bottom left corner of the image appears the irregular galaxy NGC 1427A, which is plunging toward the heart of the cluster at roughly 2.2 million kilometers (or 1.3 million miles) per hour. This headlong rush to destruction will eventually result in the galaxy being disrupted — pulled apart by gravitational interactions with other galaxies.This image was captured by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam), one of the highest-performance, wide-field imagers in the world, as part of the Dark Energy Survey (DES). Funded by the US Department of Energy (DOE) and built and tested at DOE’s Fermilab, DECam was operated by DOE and the National Science Foundation (NSF) between 2013 and 2019. At present DECam is used for programs covering a huge range of science.Review the full photo release on NOIRLab’s website at noirlab.edu/public/news/noirlab2126/.#NOIRLab #DiscoverTogether @darkenergysurvey #DECam #NSFstories #FornaxClusterCredit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURAAcknowledgment: Image processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), J. Miller (Gemini Observatory/NSF’s NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF’s NOIRLab) & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab) ... See MoreSee Less

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News

Scientists Leverage HPC and AI to Wrangle the ‘Galaxy Zoo’

July 8, 2019 12:00 pm

The research team developed a new approach to classifying these hundreds of millions of galaxies. Instead of relying on crowdsourced classification, the researchers used knowledge from the state-of-the-art Xception neural network, combined with the datasets generated by the Galaxy Zoo project, to train its deep learning models. They then applied the trained model to galactic images from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) – where it achieved a 99.6% accuracy in identifying spiral and elliptical galaxies.

Three sky surveys completed in preparation for Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument

July 8, 2019 12:00 pm

It took three sky surveys — conducted at telescopes in two continents, covering one-third of the visible sky, and requiring almost 1,000 observing nights – to prepare for a new project that will create the largest 3-D map of the universe’s galaxies and glean new insights about the universe’s accelerating expansion. This Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project will explore this expansion, driven by a mysterious property known as dark energy, in great detail. It could also make unexpected discoveries during its five-year mission.

Multiple Measurements close in on Dark Energy

May 6, 2019 12:00 pm

An extensive analysis of four different phenomena within the universe points the way to understanding the nature of dark energy, a collaboration between more than 100 scientists reveals. Dark energy – the force that propels the acceleration of the expanding universe – is a mysterious thing. It’s nature, write telescope scientist Timothy Abbott from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, in Chile, and colleagues, “is unknown, and understanding its properties and origin is one of the principal challenges in modern physics”. Indeed, there is a lot at stake. Current measurements indicate that dark energy can be smoothly incorporated into the theory of general relativity as a cosmological constant; but, the researchers note, those measurements are far from precise and incorporate a wide range of potential variations.

Viewpoint: Dark Energy Faces Multiple Probes

May 1, 2019 12:00 pm

One of the top goals in cosmology today is understanding the dark energy that is responsible for the accelerated expansion of the Universe. Is the dark energy consistent with the cosmological constant of general relativity—representing a constant energy density filling space homogenously? Or can we find deviations from general relativity on cosmological scales that suggest a more complex nature for gravity? Questions like these motivate the current and next generations of surveys that aim to map out ever larger volumes of the Universe, using a wide variety of probes to constrain the properties of dark energy. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) has now derived such constraints from the combined analysis of four canonical observables related to dark energy: supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillations, gravitational lensing, and galaxy clustering [1]. The resulting bounds confirm what we knew from previous studies, which focused on single probes. But the results indicate that this multiprobe approach could allow surveys in the 2020s to improve such constraints by orders of magnitude, possibly bringing us close to solving the dark energy puzzle.

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.