570-megapixel dark energy camera takes first pictures of space
Why is the expansion of the universe accelerating? We're not quite sure. But like every other problem, we may be able to solve it with more megapixels. 570 megapixels seems like it might be enough, and Fermilab has just fired up its massive Dark Energy Camera to see what it can find.
It's gigapixels that are all the rage nowadays, and all of those gigapixel images come from little tiny cameras taking lots of pictures and stitching them together. DECam works sort of the same way, in that it's made up of 62 individual "cameras" all stitched together in one huge sensor. Every time DECam takes a picture, all of these cameras team up to record 2.2 degrees worth of sky, which is about the equivalent as the size of a full Moon as seen from Earth twenty times over.
DECam is mounted at the focal point of a 13-foot-wide mirror on a telescope in Chile, and over the next five years, it will capture a full eighth of the night sky in exquisitely detailed color images, including 300 million galaxies, 100,000 galaxy clusters, and 4,000 supernovae. Specifically, DECam will be searching for Dark Energy via studies of Type Ia supernovae, baryon acoustic oscillations, galaxy clusters, and weak gravitational lensing, with the hope of eventually being able to identify a cause for the acceleration of the expansion of the universe.
Whatever this thing finds, it's already producing some spectacular images, and you can see the very first of them in the gallery below.
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Zoomed-in image from the Dark Energy Camera of the center of the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae, which lies about 17,000 light years from Earth. Credit: Dark Energy Survey Collaboration.
Zoomed-in image from the Dark Energy Camera of the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365, in the Fornax cluster of galaxies, which lies about 60 million light years from Earth. Credit: Dark Energy Survey Collaboration.
Zoomed-in image from the Dark Energy Camera of the Fornax cluster of galaxies, which lies about 60 million light years from Earth. Credit: Dark Energy Survey Collaboration.
Full Dark Energy Camera composite image of the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae, which lies about 17,000 light years from Earth. Credit: Dark Energy Survey Collaboration.
Full Dark Energy Camera composite image of the Small Magellanic Cloud (a band of greenish stars running from lower left to upper right), a dwarf galaxy that lies about 200,000 light years from Earth, and is a satellite of our Milky Way galaxy. Credit: Dark Energy Survey Collaboration.
