Physics Colloquium: Progress on the Dark Energy Survey

Thursday, April 27, 2017

3:30 PM-4:30 PM

Gary Bernstein, PhD, University of Pennsylvania

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a survey of 1/8 of the sky in five visible/near-IR bands, conducted with a new 500-Megapixel CCD camera installed on the venerable Blanco 4-meter telescope in Chile. The primary goal of the survey is to constrain the acceleration of the Hubble expansion and potential modifications of General Relativity at large scales, using precision measurements of galaxy clustering, gravitational lensing, high-redshift supernovae, and the abundance of massive clusters of galaxies, using imaging substantially more accurate and precise than the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Like Sloan, the DES is yielding insights on all astronomical scales, not just cosmological constraints. DES has recently completed the fourth of a planned 5 years of observations. He will review the design and performance of the survey, and present some of the scientific highlights of analyses to date.

Contact Information

Professor Gordon Richards
gtr@physics.drexel.edu