Star trails from a long exposure image of the Blanco telescope in Chile. Credit: T. Abbott & CTIO/NOAO/AURA/NSF
Scientists from Portsmouth are today joining cosmologists from around the world in Chile to mark the 50th anniversary of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory and the formal dedication of its Dark Energy Survey camera.
The observatory is the focus of the Dark Energy Survey, an international project to answer one of cosmology’s greatest mysteries – why the expansion of the universe is speeding up rather than being slowed by gravity.
To help solve the mystery the observatory is home to a 570-megapixel camera, the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created. The size of a telephone box, it will, for the first time, capture light from over 100,000 galaxies up to eight billion light years away.
Dr Marco Bruni, Reader in Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, will represent the University’s Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the ceremony.
Dr Bruni said: “Our involvement with the Dark Energy Survey is huge. The institute of Cosmology and Gravitation has invested hundreds of thousands of pounds and many members of staff have devoted their research to trying to understand Dark Energy.
“Thanks to recent research we now know that the Universe is expanding at an accelerated rate and that Dark Energy is the source of this acceleration. However we still don’t understand what Dark Energy is.
“Dark Energy makes up about 70 per cent of today’s Universe and so understanding it is crucial and will lead us to a new view of physics and of the Universe.”
The Dark Energy Survey will undertake the largest galaxy survey ever attempted and use that data to study four probes of Dark Energy – galaxy clusters, supernovae, the large-scale clumping of galaxies and weak gravitational lensing. This will be the first time all four of these methods will be possible in a single experiment.
The survey will also provide important information about the evolution of galaxies throughout the Universe’s history and is expected to begin after the camera is fully tested, in about a month.
Scientists in the Dark Energy Survey collaboration include four astrophysicists from Portsmouth and others from University College London, Cambridge, Edinburgh, Sussex and Nottingham. The construction of the DES Camera was partially supported by UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council and the project is led by Fermilab in the US.
The Dark Energy Survey is supported by funding from funding agencies the UK, Spain, Brazil, Germany, and Switzerland, the US Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and the participating Dark Energy Survey institutions.
Director of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Nicole van der Bliek, said at today’s 50thanniversary celebration in Chile: “Bringing the Dark Energy Camera online and making it available for the astronomical is a milestone in the history of Cerro Tololo. We are very proud that we start the celebration of 50 years of service to astronomers with the dedication of this brand new capability.”
The observatory was founded 50 years ago in 1962 when the mountain top at Cerro Tololo was chosen as the site for the US southern hemisphere observatory complex.
For more information on the Dark Energy Survey, visit: www.darkenergysurvey.org
