WORTH MENTIONING Giant digital camera probes cosmic ‘dark energy,’ the universe’s deepest mystery By Brian Vastag,September 07, 2013 Technicians installed the $50 million Dark Energy Camera atop a telescope in Chile last year. Technicians installed the $50 million Dark Energy Camera atop a telescope… (Reidar Hahn/Fermilab ) With the whir of a giant digital camera, the biggest mystery in the universe is about to become a bit less mysterious. Fifteen years ago, the world of science was rocked by the discovery that, contrary to our notions of gravity, distant galaxies appeared to be flying apart at an ever-accelerating rate. The observation implied that space itself was stretching apart faster and faster. It was akin to watching a dropped ball reverse course, speed upward and disappear into the sky. The discovery made many cosmologists — the scientists who probe the very nature of nature itself — acutely uncomfortable. For either our understanding of gravity is cockeyed, or some mysterious repulsive force — quickly and glibly dubbed “dark energy” — permeates the universe. Ads by Google What is Quantum Jumping?Discover Why Thousands of People are "Jumping" to Change Their Life QuantumJumping In 2011, the Nobel Committee blessed the improbable discovery as real, handing their prize in physics to the two teams that nearly simultaneously made the observation. “As unhappy as it made some of us, the expansion of the universe is indeed accelerating,” said Marc Kamionkowski, professor of physics and astronomy at Johns Hopkins University. “That’s how the universe works.” Now, after years of planning and construction, four new projects at telescopes in Chile, Hawaii and the South Pole are getting a handle on what, exactly, is doing this unseemly pushing. Leading the way is the world’s most powerful digital camera, constructed at Fermilab, the Energy Department facility in Illinois. The $50 million Dark Energy Camera took a decade to plan and build, and it sports a resolution of 570 megapixels — about a hundredfold more pixels than a smartphone camera. Technicians installed it atop a telescope in Chile last year, and after initial jitters — the camera was so heavy it made the telescope jiggle — the camera has been “tested, tweaked and fine-tuned,” said Joshua Frieman, the Fermilab scientist leading the project, which has enlisted 120 scientists from 23 countries. On Aug. 31, the big camera began snapping its way across a huge swath of the southern sky. Each click captures light from nearly 100,000 distant galaxies. Over the next five years, the project, called the Dark Energy Survey, will catalog some 300 million galaxies and thousands of exploding stars flung across distant space and time, in what Frieman called “the biggest galactic survey yet.” Every night, scientists will beam 400 gigabytes of camera data to a supercomputing center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where machines will build a giant time-lapse map of the universe going back some 8 billion years — or more than half way to the Big Bang that started it all.
Posted on: Fri, 13 Sep 2013 03:45:10 +0000
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