Abstract:
I will give an overview of the Dark Energy Survey (DES) project and highlight its early science results, focusing on cosmology results from the first year of the survey. The DES collaboration built the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera for the Blanco 4-meter telescope at NOAO’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile to carry out a deep, wide-area, multi-band optical survey of several hundred million galaxies and a time-domain survey to discover several thousand supernovae. The survey started in Aug. 2013 and will finish in 2018. DES was designed to address the questions: why is the expansion of the Universe speeding up? Is cosmic acceleration due to dark energy or does it require a modification of General Relativity? DES is addressing these questions by measuring the history of cosmic expansion and the growth of structure through multiple complementary techniques: galaxy clusters, the large-scale galaxy distribution, weak and strong gravitational lensing, and supernovae, as well as through cross-correlation with other data sets. I will also discuss how the DES data are being used to make a variety of other astronomical discoveries, from the outer Solar System to ultra-faint dwarf galaxies around the Milky Way to the first kilonova counterpart of a binary neutron star gravitational-wave source.

Host: Paul Schechter

Time: 4:00 pm
Place: Room 10-250
Refreshments @ 3:30 pm in 4-349 (Pappalardo Community Room)