World's most powerful digicam sees ‘dark energy’

The world’s most powerful digital camera will not be available in your neighborhood gadget store anytime soon. But it has already taken its first few photos that could change the way humans view the universe. 

 

This ultra-sophisticated camera, dubbed the "Dark Energy Camera (DECam)", sits atop a mountain in Chile. It is installed on the Victor M. Blanco Telescope of the National Science Foundation's Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. 

 

But according to Popular Science Magazine (PopSci Magazine), it is not the "world’s most powerful optical telescope, nor is it the world’s highest-resolution camera or the largest instrument of its kind" but it can sure do something better than any other instrument in the world, especially in the field of astronomy and physics.

 

As its name suggests, DECam is a special instrument dedicated to study dark energy. This then puts it and its first few snaps at the top of the astrophysics pedestal.

 

DECam took eight years to construct at the Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, USA. It has a sensor packed with 570 megapixels to capture light that had traveled millions of light years. It is custom-built to have thicker charge-couple devices than average astronomical cameras, making them more sensitive to red-shifted light, making it the perfect astronomical time machine.

 

"A galaxy that’s moving away from us rapidly, its light will be shifted from the blue into the red part of the visible spectrum simply due to the fact that it’s moving away from us at a very high speed," said University of Chicago's Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics  professor, and theoretical physicist at Fermilab Dr. Joshua Frieman in a PopSci Magazine interview.

 

Dark energy is the most accepted explanation for the universe's accelerating expansion. Although the phenomenon is yet to be understood (and seen) by physicists all over the globe, its effects are observable, taking up three-fourths of the entire universe. 

 

"Dark energy" was discovered in 1998 and earned scientists Brian Schmidt, Saul Perlmutter, and Adam Riess the Nobel Prize in 2011, 13 years after their study has been first published.

 

However, Frieman explained that, dark energy is “really just a stand-in for saying we don’t understand what’s going on.”

 

Megacamera

 

Frieman also serves as the director of the Dark Energy Survey (DES), which seeks to discover the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy. DES collaborated in the creation of the DECam for the survey. 

 

Frieman said that with DECam, DES can map about 300 million galaxies. "Then in a separate survey we will make a kind of cosmic movie--we’ll go back to the same part of the sky every few nights and measure about 4,000 supernovae. And by making such a large map and measuring these supernovae, we plan to probe the properties of dark energy with much greater precision than we’ve been able to do with previous surveys and previous data.”

 

This is by far the biggest astronomical survey to be done in the history of astrophysical research.

 

"We’ve done surveys before, but what’s been achievable has been limited.” Frieman said. 

 

The physicist added, “This instrument will really allow us to make a substantial leap forward beyond what’s been possible with the instruments available so far.”

 

Einstein's constant "k"

 

In the early 20th century, Albert Einstein predicted that the universe is static through an equation with a constant "k" (kappa). But he abandoned the static universe theory after Edwin Hubble made his discovery that the universe is expanding.  

 

Einstein had called the cosmological constant his "biggest blunder."

 

However, many physicists believe that dark energy is really Einstein's "k," and should that could be the case, Frieman said the key to finding out may be the DECam.

 

“But what would be even more exciting would be to find evidence that it’s not the cosmological constant, that there’s something else, some new form of energy that we haven’t yet really grappled with,” said Frieman. 

 

He added, “In my mind, that would be the ideal result.” — DVM, GMA News