DECam tagged posts

Latest dark energy survey data suggest possible variations in dark energy over time

Latest dark energy survey data suggest possible variations in dark energy over time
The Dark Energy Camera (DECam), fabricated by the Department of Energy (DOE), is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in north-central Chile. Telescope construction started in 1969 with the casting of the primary mirror. The assembly at the Cerro Tololo mountaintop was finished in 1974. Upon completion of construction it was the 3rd largest telescope in the world, behind the 200-inch Hale telescope at Palomar Observatory in California and the BTA-6 in southern Russia, and was the largest in the Southern Hemisphere (a title that it held for 22 years). It was later named in 1995 in honor of Víctor M. Blanco, Puerto Rican astronomer and former director of CTIO. Credit: DOE/FNAL/DECam/R. Hahn/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA 

A new...

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Faint Dwarf Galaxies in Fornax cluster shed light on a Cosmological Mystery of “The Missing Satellites”

Faint dwarf galaxies in Fornax shed light on a cosmological mystery

Image of the inner 3 square degrees of the NGFS survey footprint compared with the size of the Moon. Low surface brightness dwarf galaxies are marked by red circles. Gray circles indicate previously known dwarf galaxies. The dwarf galaxies, which vastly outnumber the bright galaxies, may be the “missing satellites” predicted by cosmological simulations.

The discovery was carried out using the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the 4-m Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO). Computer simulations of the evolution of the matter distribution in the Universe predict that dwarf galaxies should vastly outnumber galaxies like the Milky Way, with hundreds of low mass dwarf galaxies predicted for every Milky Way-like galaxy...

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