The World's Biggest Camera to Survey 300 Million Galaxies

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) camera will map 300 million galaxies using the Blanco 4-meter telescope - a large telescope with new advanced optics at Chile’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. This instrument will consist of an extremely red sensitive 500 Megapixel camera, with a 1 meter diameter, 2.2 degree field of view prime focus corrector, and a data acquisition system fast enough to take images in 17 seconds.

Creating this huge map of the galaxy will enable astronomers to measure the dark energy far more precisely than current observations. Professor Ofer Lahav, who leads the United Kingdom DES Consortium said, "Dark Energy is one of the biggest puzzles in the whole of Physics, going back to a concept proposed by Einstein 90 years ago. The DES observations will tell us if Einstein was right or if we need a major shift in our understanding of the universe.”

The glass for the five lenses was manufactured in the US. In France the lenses will be polished to a smoothness level of one millionth of a centimeter. After, polishing, the lenses will be sent to the telescope in Chile.

Observations are scheduled to begin in 2011, continuing until 2016. The team’s goals are to extract cosmological information on dark energy from counting galaxy clusters and the spatial distribution of clusters, and measuring the redshift of galaxies and supernovae.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

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