Speaker
Dr.
Eusebio Sanchez
(CIEMAT)
Description
The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a next generation sky survey
aimed directly at understanding the dark energy, by measuring
the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion and the growth
of structure in the universe with high precision.
During fall 2012 the DES collaboration installed and commissioned
DECam, a 570 mega-pixel optical and near-infrared camera with a
large 3 sq. deg. field of view, set at the prime focus of the
4-meter Blanco telescope in CTIO, Chile, and took the first set of
science images for Science Verfification. The first observing
season then went from August 2013 to February 2014. Observing
during five seasons, DECam will map an entire octant of the
southern sky to unprecedented depth, measuring the position on
the sky, redshift and shape of almost 300 million galaxies, together
with thousands of galaxy clusters and supernovae. With this data
set, DES will study the properties of dark energy using four main
probes: galaxy clustering on large scales, weak gravitational
lensing, galaxy-cluster abundance, and supernova distances. In
this talk we present the current status of the project, and the
plans and goals for the coming years.
Primary author
Dr.
Eusebio Sanchez
(CIEMAT)
