To study dark energy’s effects over the past 11 billion years, Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has created the largest 3D map of our cosmos ever constructed, with the most precise measurements to date.
- This is the first time scientists have measured the expansion history of the young universe with a precision better than 1%, giving us our best view yet of how the universe evolved.
Lambda CDM
- This new model of the universe is known as Lambda CDM. It includes both a weakly interacting type of matter (cold dark matter, or CDM) and dark energy (Lambda).
- Both matter and dark energy shape how the universe expands – but in opposing ways. Matter and dark matter slow the expansion down, while dark energy speeds it up.
Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI)
- DESI is a unique piece of equipment with 5,000 robotic ‘eyes’, each one of which can separately capture and process light coming from a galaxy.
- This gives DESI, mounted on the Nicholas W Mayall 4-meter Telescope at the Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, US, the capability to observe 5,000 galaxies at the same time. With DESI, researchers can look 11 billion years into the past.
- The light from far-flung objects in space is just now reaching the DESI, enabling researchers to map cosmos as it was in its youth and trace its growth to what we see today.
- Understanding how our universe has evolved is tied to how it ends, and to one of the biggest mysteries in physics: dark energy, the unknown ingredient causing our universe to expand faster and faster.
