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Fermilab VMS
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The world’s largest dark energy–hunting device, also one of the biggest, heaviest and highest-resolution cameras in the world, is close to completion.
Construction of the 4-ton Dark Energy Camera is wrapping up next month at Fermilab in Illinois, where it’s being tested on a mock-up telescope mount (above). The Dark Energy Survey hopes to open its $35 million camera for business at its final destination, in the Blanco telescope atop a Chilean mountain, by October 2011.
There, it will scan deep space for signs of dark energy, an invisible force that's pulling groups of galaxies — and perhaps space itself — apart at faster and faster speeds.
“We’re going to survey 300 million galaxies in the southern sky to measure the speed of those galaxies,” said Tom Diehl, a physicist at Fermilab and a camera-construction leader. “We want to make the best description of the universe’s expansion to date.”
The faster an object moves away from the Earth, the more its light shifts toward a red color. Measurements of distant galaxies show all of them are red-shifted and moving away from us and each other.
“What's more, they’re moving away faster and faster, like pennies on the surface of an inflating balloon,” said Josh Frieman, an astrophysicist who is directing the Dark Energy Survey effort.
Since the 1990s, astronomers suspected this expansion of space is accelerating because of a strange form of energy, dubbed dark energy because of its baffling nature. The new survey should improve our understanding of dark energy by about four to five times through improved red-shift measurements, Diehl said, helping get to the bottom of the mystery.
“We don’t know why the universe is speeding up, and that’s precisely why we’re doing the Dark Energy Survey,” Frieman said. “We’re trying to pin down the nature of dark energy.”
Since 2008, roughly 120 astronomers, engineers, and physicists have worked on the camera. As its construction comes to a close, we take a look at the Dark Energy Camera’s progress.
Above:
Video: Building the Test Mount
Time-lapse footage of the Dark Energy Camera’s test mount being built from January to October 2010. FermilabVia: symmetry breaking
See Also:
- Huge CCD Could Give Real-Time View of Dark Energy Hunt
- Focusing on Dark Energy With Cosmic Lens
- Dark Energy and Exoplanets Top List of Astronomy Priorities
- Dark Energy Hunters Catch a Wave
- New Look at Big Bang Radiation Refines Age of Universe
- Most Distant Galaxy Ever Confirmed
- Dark Energy Could Be Einstein's Cosmological Constant
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