Light-years Away, Right at Home
As the Galaxy sets behind the Blanco telescope, our home away from home, we are reminded of where we really are. Earth resides in a mere village of planets, one of many in a city of stars – our Milky Way galaxy – which, as these detectives see it, is our true home.
But it is the distant stars and galaxies, just like those we call home, that betray patterns in our cosmos.
We operate in the dark of night to find as many as we can, as carefully as we can. We track locations, movements, interactions, explosions and lifetimes of millions of individuals. Only these clues in aggregate (for the most part), will lead us down a starlit path to an understanding of our universe’s greatest tug of war: that which is between the pull of gravity and the accelerating expansion of dark energy.
The detectives have gone back to work for Season 2 of observing and combing the logs of photons as they stream into the trap we’ve set, the Dark Energy Camera (DECam). In the coming months, we’re turning these streams into nuggets of knowledge, the first puzzle pieces to be revealed by the Dark Energy Survey (@theDESurvey).
And ultimately this knowledge brings us back home, to understanding our place in the cosmos.
I’m here now at the Blanco, writing this as we prepare for our third night of observations and tracking in Season 2 of DES, with bags under our eyes, coffee mugs in hand, watching the fires in the sky.
Det. B. Nord (@briandnord)
If you run into us where the electrons roam (FB, Twitter, Reddit, etc.), don’t be afraid of the dark – get in touch. We’ll report every two weeks (and occasionally more), and we’ll have more detectives and more ways to tell the stories.
Today, there’s an announcement about the beginning of Season 2, along with a spate of videos and images about the team of detectives, the location and the machine we’ve built.
Dark Energy Detectives 