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The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision.
More than 120 scientists from 23 institutions in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Germany are working on the project. This collaboration is building an extremely sensitive 570-Megapixel digital camera, DECam, and will mount it on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory high in the Chilean Andes. Starting in Sept. 2012 and continuing for five years, DES will survey a large swath of the southern sky out to vast distances in order to provide new clues to this most fundamental of questions.
The survey nature of DES is driven by its science requirements which require information about a large number of galaxies at the most distant reaches of the viewable universe. The DES will catalog the sky in a 5000 square degree area over 525 nights of viewing using the new Dark Energy Camera (DECam). It will record information on over 300 million galaxies, most so faint that their light is around 1 million times fainter than the dimmest star that can be seen with the naked eye. Some of these galaxies are so distant that the light we see from them will have left the galaxy when the universe was less than half its current age.
DES tries to answer the question: Why is the universe expansion speeding up?
