Dark Energy Survey Physicists Open New Window into Dark Energy
Anti-aristarchus writes:
Source: Dark Energy Survey physicists open new window into dark energy:
The universe is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, and while no one is sure why, researchers with the Dark Energy Survey (DES) at least had a strategy for figuring it out: They would combine measurements of the distribution of matter, galaxies and galaxy clusters to better understand what's going on.
Reaching that goal turned out to be pretty tricky, but now a team led by researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Stanford University and the University of Arizona have come up with a solution. Their analysis, published April 6 in Physical Review Letters, yields more precise estimates of the average density of matter as well as its propensity to clump together-two key parameters that help physicists probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy, the mysterious substances that make up the vast majority of the universe.
"It is one of the best constraints from one of the best data sets to date," says Chun-Hao To, a lead author on the new paper and a graduate student at SLAC and Stanford working with Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology Director Risa Wechsler.
Serendipity?
When DES set out in 2013 to map an eighth of the sky, the goal was to gather four kinds of data: the distances to certain types of supernovae, or exploding stars; the distribution of matter in the universe; the distribution of galaxies; and the distribution of galaxy clusters. Each tells researchers something about how the universe has evolved over time.
[...] To avoid mishandling all this information, University of Arizona astrophysicist Elisabeth Krause and colleagues have developed a new model that could properly account for the connections in the distributions of all three quantities: matter, galaxies, and galaxy clusters. In doing so, they were able to produce the first-ever analysis to properly combine all these disparate data sets in order to learn about dark matter and dark energy.
Certain Soylentils are going to be very put out!
Journal Reference:
Chun-Hao To, et al (DES Collaboration). Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: Cosmological Constraints from Cluster Abundances, Weak Lensing, and Galaxy Correlations, Physical Review Letters (DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.126.141301)
Previously:
Could Something Missing in the Universe be Revealed by Ripples in Spacetime?
Astronomers Identified a Piece of the Milky Way's Missing Matter
Warp Drive News. Seriously!
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