The Dark Energy Survey

The Dark Energy Survey is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and to uncover the nature of dark energy.

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is designed to probe the origin of the accelerating universe and help uncover the nature of dark energy by measuring the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision. More than 120 scientists from 23 institutions in the United States, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and Germany are working on the project. This collaboration has built and deployed an extremely sensitive 570-Megapixel digital camera, DECam. This new camera has been mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, high in the Chilean Andes. Starting in August of 2013 and continuing for five years, DES has begun to survey a large swath of the southern sky out to vast distances in order to provide new clues to this most fundamental of questions.