Also announces discovery of eleven stellar streams, evidence of small galaxies being eaten by the Milky Way At a special session held during the American Astronomical Society meeting in Washington, D.C., scientists on the Dark Energy Survey (DES) announced today the public release of their first three years of data. This first major release of… More »
The world will soon be celebrating the hunt for the universe’s most elusive matter in a series of Dark Matter Day (www.darkmatterday.com) events planned in over a dozen countries. The events, planned on and around the formally recognized day on Oct. 31, 2017, will engage the public in discussions about dark matter, which together with… More »
New result rivals precision of cosmic microwave background measurements, supports view that dark matter and dark energy make up most of the cosmos Imagine planting a single seed and, with great precision, being able to predict the exact height of the tree that grows from it. Now imagine traveling to the future and snapping… More »
The PICO-60 detector was originally called “COUPP-60,” with COUPP standing for “Chicagoland Observatory for Underground Particle Physics.” It was designed and built by Fermilab in collaboration with the University of Chicago and Indiana University, South Bend. Work began at Fermilab in 2005, and, after extensive testing, the detector was moved to SNOLAB in 2012. “We’ve been… More »
New dwarf galaxy candidates could mean our sky is more crowded than we thought Scientists on the Dark Energy Survey, using one of the world’s most powerful digital cameras, have discovered eight more faint celestial objects hovering near our Milky Way galaxy. Signs indicate that they, like the objects found by the same team earlier this year, are… More »
Analysis will help scientists understand the role that dark matter plays in galaxy formation Scientists on the Dark Energy Survey have released the first in a series of dark matter maps of the cosmos. These maps, created with one of the world’s most powerful digital cameras, are the largest contiguous maps created at this level of detail… More »
Scientists on two continents have independently discovered a set of celestial objects that seem to belong to the rare category of dwarf satellite galaxies orbiting our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Dwarf galaxies are the smallest known galaxies, and they could hold the key to understanding dark matter and the process by which larger galaxies… More »
Eight billion years ago, rays of light from distant galaxies began their long journey to Earth. That ancient starlight has now found its way to a mountaintop in Chile, where the newly constructed Dark Energy Camera, the most powerful sky-mapping machine ever created, has captured and recorded it for the first time. That light may… More »
