Dark Energy is a bit of a problem in Cosmology. It makes up 75% of the universe, it’s speeding up the expansion of the universe, and we don’t have any idea what it is.
In order to get a handle on what Dark Energy really is, we need to get a detailed survey of phenomena such as:
- Type Ia Supernovae in distant galaxies,
- Clusters of galaxies
- Baryon acoustic oscillations
- Gravitational lensing
That’s the Small Magellanic Cloud – a small satellite galaxy to our own Milky Way about 200,000 light years away. Of course, the SMC has been imaged in its entirety before, but not to such a high resolution in a single image.
Over the next five years, the camera will create detailed images of one-eighth of the southern sky. One-eighth might not seem like a whole lot, but that’s 5,000 square degrees – enough to discover 300 million galaxies, measure 100,000 galaxy clusters, and detect 4,000 supernovae. Suffice to say, that is a lot of data, and astronomers are going to need it if they are going to get a better handle on what Dark Energy is. After all, if we cannot see it, we have to look at the universe on a very large scale if we’re going to be able to measure its effects on the stuff we can see.
So, the Dark Energy Camera is locked and loaded at the prime focus of the Blanco telescope. just about ready to begin its investigation into something that makes up the overwhelming majority of the universe that we didn’t even know about until 15 years ago. I can’t wait to see what we learn.
