Speaker
Jelena Aleksic
(IFAE)
Description
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a next-generation large galaxy survey designed to study the origin of the accelerating Universe and the nature of dark energy. These goals are to be achieved through combination of four distinct probes: baryon acoustic oscillations, abundance and spatial distribution of clusters, weak gravitational lensing, and Type Ia supernovae. The main instrument of the survey is DECam - a state-of-the-art 570 mega-pixel CCD camera, with a large, 3 sq. deg. field of view, built by the DES Collaboration and installed at the prime focus of the Victor M. Blanco 4-meter telescope in CTIO, Chile. Over the period of five years, DECam will survey 5000 sq. deg. of the southern sky with unprecedented depth, measuring positions, redshift and shape of almost 300 million galaxies, as well as thousands of clusters and supernovae.
Here are presented the status and some of the first DES science results, such as the discovery of new Milky Way dwarf satellite galaxies and the mapping of the dark matter distribution across large areas of the sky.
Primary author
Jelena Aleksic
(IFAE)
