Speaker
Mr
Carlos Cunha
(Stanford University)
Description
The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2011 was awarded for the discovery that the
expansion of the Universe is accelerating. Yet the physical origin of
cosmic acceleration remains a mystery. The Dark Energy Survey (DES) aims
to address the questions: why is the expansion speeding up? Is cosmic
acceleration due to dark energy or does it require a modification of
General Relativity? If dark energy, is it the energy density of the vacuum
(Einstein's cosmological constant) or something else? DES will address
these questions by measuring the history of cosmic expansion and of the
growth of structure through four complementary techniques: galaxy
clusters, large-scale galaxy clustering, weak gravitational lensing, and
supernovae. The DES collaboration has built a new, 570-megapixel, digital
camera for the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American
Observatory in Chile to carry out a deep, wide-area sky survey of 300
million galaxies and a narrower, time-domain survey that will discover
4000 supernovae over 525 nights starting in Sept. 2013. This talk will overview
the DES project, which achieved `first light' in September 2012, describe
early science results from commissioning and science verification of the
instrument, and discuss the plans and goals of the survey.
| APS member ID | FR745438 |
|---|
Primary author
Mr
Carlos Cunha
(Stanford University)
