Tuesday, March 5, 2013

FIRST IMAGES FROM THE DARK ENERGY CAMERA


The Dark Energy Camera (DECam) began taking images of ancient light from far off galaxies last week, using its 570-megapixel camera. Scientists at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory lead the project, which is the culmination of eight years of planning and construction. The instrument was transported and mounted on the 4-metre Victor M. Blanco Telescope, at the National Science Foundation’s Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

The first images from DECam show the camera systems will supply good data for research. Researchers from Dark Energy Survey (DES) will use DECam images of known objects to DECam images of objects like unknown galaxy clusters. Comparisons can be made between the brightness of a star with known brightness of 10 million photons, with an unknown cluster with a brightness of 5 million photons.

DECam’s photos over the next five years will help create detailed survey of one eighth of the sky. This will then turn into a map DES researchers can use to turn into a map of the dark matter in DECam’s section of the universe. This map can then be used to look for signs of the influence of dark energy.

The image is a zoomed-in version 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. The whole structure, including its two outer spiral arms, spreads over around 200,000 light-years.


Read more: https://news.slac.stanford.edu/features/first-images-dark-energy-camera-help-slac-stanford-astrophysicists-seek-invisiblehttp://www.darkenergysurvey.org/DECam/camera.shtml;http://www.lsst.org/lsst/
http://www.eso.org/public/news/eso1038/



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