Dark Energy and Me
Man it’s cold outside. Ordinarily, I would be referring to Colorado, where the past few days have seen five inches of snow and about 20 degrees.
This time, I’m actually referring to the weather in another state: Illinois, where it’s cold, rainy and wet. As I look out of my office in the Astronomy Building of the University of Illinois, I see lots of steam rising from the heating vents, reminding me that I’m not in Colorado anymore.
The reason I’m here (one of many as it turns out) is dark energy. Specifically, I’m helping to measure it. I’m going to write code that processes images from the dark energy camera, known as DECam, a 500 megapixel wonder that sports 62 CCD’s stuck together to make one very large imager.
I’m a member of The Dark Energy Survey Data Management team and I’ll have a lot more to say about that in future posts. The short description is that there will be roughly 300 GB of science image data coming out of this camera each observing night, with a total of approximately 165 terabytes of data that’s gotta be transferred, calibrated, turned into science products and archived.
My job, among other things, will be to develop algorithms to precisely combine images that measure things like supernova distances, galaxy cluster evolution, and weak gravitational lensing.
If you have no idea what I’m talking about, you will, dear readers, before I’m finished with you.
The goal of The Dark Energy Survey is to try to characterize what dark energy is by focusing on something called w, a parameter in the dark energy equation of state.
I was going to write some more stuff about what dark energy is, but then I noticed Sean did a great job today, so go read his post instead.
Here’s another good website to give you some basics on dark energy: Why Is the Universe Accelerating?
I’ll give you more details about The Dark Energy Survey in future posts. In the meantime, where’s my raincoat?
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