Sometimes you catch wind of a scientific project so gargantuan, so profound in its vision and scope, that it’s hard to wrap your head around. This is one of those projects: after five years of scanning the sky, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has finished building the most detailed 3D map of the universe ever assembled. They did so by tracking more than 47 million galaxies and quasars, along with 20 million stars, over 11 billion years of cosmic history, all encapsulated in an image.
There are scientific purposes to this beyond snapping a selfie with the widest lens imaginable. It’s an attempt to understand dark energy, the invisible force believed to make up nearly 70 percent of the universe and drive its rapid expansion. The consensus was that dark energy is a constant. A cosmic substance that doesn’t change much, if at all. All this new data from DESI seems to indicate otherwise.
Now that scientists have the full dataset at their disposal, they are ready to dig into whether dark energy really does change over time. If it does, it could rewrite all current predictions about the universe’s expiration date and help explain how and why the universe is constantly and rapidly expanding.
Scientists Just Built an Absurdly Detailed 3D Map of the Universe
DESI pulled this off using 5,000 fiber-optic sensors mounted at Kitt Peak National Observatory. Every night, it captured tens of gigabytes of data, mapping positions, velocities, and compositions of distant cosmic stuff. Bit by bit, it built a layered, extremely high-resolution picture of the all-encompassing structure of space.
DESI was so good at its job that researchers were able to give it some extra credit assignments, such as a Bright-Time Survey that studied how moonlight interferes with deep space observations.
Next up, now that this incredible treasure trove of data has been collected, it’s up to the countless scientists were going to pour over the numbers to look for patterns both big and small and attempt to answer some of the biggest questions we have about the universe, it’s sprawling history, and about dark energy, the mysterious goo that binds the universe.
As for DESI itself, it’s going to keep scanning the skies through 2028 to fill in some gaps and revisit some overlooked regions. But there should be more than enough here after its initial five-year mission to keep researchers occupied for many years to come.
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