New Chapter on Dark Energy Unfolds

New Chapter on Dark Energy Unfolds With Release of Largest Most Precise 3D Map of Our Expanding Universe
Speaker: Stephen Bailey, a senior software developer in Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division who leads the Data Management team for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI).
Dark energy, the mysterious phenomenon that accelerates the rate at which our universe is expanding, has baffled scientists since its discovery in 1998, a discovery for which Berkeley Lab’s Saul Perlmutter shared the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics. To better understand the effects of dark energy, an international collaboration managed by the Lab is mapping the expansion of the universe over the past 11 billion years using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI). Mounted in the 4-meter Mayall telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory, DESI deploys 5,000 robots to measure the spectral redshifts of more than 30 million galaxies and quasars. This past spring, DESI released the largest and most precise 3D map of our universe to date, confirming the basics of our best cosmology model but also raising tantalizing questions to explore with further data.