Only after seven several months, a huge team of scientists working with the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument mapped an area of the universe larger than all other 3D surveys combined. And since they’re only 10% of the way through their 5-year mission, there’s much more to come.
DESI, pronounced like Desi Arnaz’s name, has revealed a spectacular cosmic web of more than 7.5 million galaxies and it will sweep up to 40 million. The instrument is funded by the US Department of Energy and is installed at the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, Arizona. It measures the exact distances of galaxies from Earth and their emitted light at a range of wavelengths, achieving quantity and quality at the same time. It will eventually cover about 8,000 square degrees, about 20% of the sky. The science of analyzing the data is not yet born, but it will especially aid astrophysicists as they study how the universe is expanding.
“It was a really great adventure. We were able to go on despite the pandemic. Julien Guy, DESI project scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the lead agency for the collaboration, said we had to close for a few months and then we adapted. Now, data observation and processing is mainly automated; Every morning, he said, scientists receive data on about 100,000 galaxies collected overnight.
“It’s amazing how well this tool works and how well designed it is to go out and reach these galaxies. It’s an incredibly efficient machine to harvest them in a way that even two decades ago, one would have to think about it,” said Jason Rhodes, a research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, who is working on a space telescope to map out galaxies in the early universe.
DESI actually consists of several instruments installed in the telescope’s 14-story dome. The circular focal plane is positioned near the top and it is made up of 10 wedge-shaped petals, each with 500 small robots. They’re what enables the device’s galaxy mapping: these 5,000 pencil-sized robotic motors locate optical fibers that must be precisely placed to within 10 microns – less than the thickness of a fiber. human hair. That allows the instrument to collect accurate data about 5,000 galaxies at once. The telescope then aimed at another area of the night sky and began operating the next 5,000. In contrast, in one of DESI’s predecessors, Sloan Digital Sky Survey, based at a telescope in southern New Mexico, scientists had to manually drill holes into a circular aluminum plate at the telescope’s focus for each set of measurements, and they plugged in tiny filaments for each celestial body. ha that they want to observe.
