On its Hunt for Dark Energy, a Telescope Stopped to Look at the Lobster Nebula - by BrianKoberlein
If you thought dark matter was difficult to study, studying dark energy is even more challenging. Dark energy is perhaps the most subtle phenomenon in the universe. It drives the evolution of the cosmos, but its effects are only seen on intergalactic scales. So to study dark energy in detail, you need a great deal of observations of wide areas of the sky.
This is why ten years ago the Department of Energy worked with astronomers to build the Dark Energy Camera . It is the highest resolution astronomical camera ever built, with more than 60 imaging CCDs, and captures images at 570 megapixels. It was installed at the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile, where it has a field of view more than 2 degrees wide, which is four times the apparent width of the Moon.
Between 2013 and 2019, DECam captured an average of 400 – 500 images a night, looking at distant supernovae, measuring the scale at which galaxies cluster together, and studying the weak gravitational lensing of intergalactic dark matter. This data has given us a deeper understanding of dark energy and helped astronomers constrain observations so they can better fit theoretical models to observation.
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