The Dark Energy Camera has taken numerous pictures. Here are 15 of essentially the most spectacular.
The Dark Energy Camera has taken greater than 1,000,000 exposures of the southern sky whereas perched excessive within the Chilean Andes. Around 2.5 billion astronomical objects, together with galaxies and galaxy clusters, stars, comets, asteroids, dwarf planets, and supernovae, have been captured within the photos.
The exceptional 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera, which was first created on the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Energy for the Dark Energy Survey, has now been observing stars for ten years. The worldwide DES cooperation makes use of deep-space knowledge to examine darkish power, a phenomenon that’s rushing up the enlargement of area.
The Dark Energy Survey, whose scientists are actually analyzing knowledge from 2013 to 2019, isn’t the one undertaking to profit from the highly effective piece of kit. The digital camera has additionally been utilized by different analysis groups to hold out extra astronomical surveys and observations. Here are only a few of the beautiful photos that the Dark Energy Camera captured.
Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA; Acknowledgment: M. Soraisam (University of Illinois); Image processing: Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani and Davide de Martin
The Southern Pinwheel Galaxy (also called Messier 83 or NGC 5236) is about 15 million lightyears from Earth. It took DECam greater than 11 hours of publicity time to seize this picture. The digital camera is mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, a program of NSF’s NOIRLab.
Credit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; Acknowledgments: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF’s NOIRLab) and D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
The Dark Energy Survey imaged one-eighth of the sky, capturing mild from galaxies as much as eight billion lightyears away. The survey repeatedly imaged 10 “deep fields” just like the one proven right here. By returning to sure sections of the sky, scientists are capable of construct up and acquire totally different wavelengths of sunshine to picture extremely distant galaxies and faint objects. These deep fields can be utilized to calibrate the remainder of the DES knowledge and to hunt for supernovae.
Credit: Marty Murphy, Nikolay Kuropatkin, Huan Lin, and Brian Yanny; Dark Energy Survey
While the Dark Energy Survey usually appears to be like at objects tens of millions or billions of lightyears away, generally nearer objects come into sight. In 2014, the Dark Energy Survey noticed Comet Lovejoy touring about 51 million miles from Earth. Each rectangle within the picture represents one of many 62 CCDs that DECam makes use of, every one a complicated sensor designed to seize mild from distant galaxies.
Credit: Dark Energy Survey
The spiral galaxy NGC 1566, generally known as the Spanish Dancer, is about 69 million lightyears from Earth. Each picture from DECam is the results of decisions made throughout picture processing. The digital camera makes use of 5 filters that every document a distinct wavelength of sunshine (between 400 and 1,080 nanometers) and could be mixed to make shade photos.
Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA/STScI, W. Clarkson (UM-Dearborn), C. Johnson (STScI), and M. Rich (UCLA)
This DECam picture, taken trying towards the middle of our Milky Way galaxy, covers an area roughly twice as wide as the full moon and contains more than 180,000 stars. You can also see a wider version encompassing more of the Milky Way’s bulge. While beautiful, the stars and dust of the Milky Way block out distant galaxies needed to study dark energy — so the Dark Energy Survey typically aims the telescope in the opposite direction, away from the plane of our galaxy.
Credit: Erin Sheldon, Dark Energy Survey
From our position on Earth, we see the spiral galaxy NGC 681 from the side (or edge-on). The galaxy, also known as the Little Sombrero Galaxy, is about 66.5 million lightyears away. To keep images of distant objects as sharp as possible, DECam uses a mechanism called a Hexapod, which uses six pneumatically driven pistons to align the camera’s many optical elements between exposures. In addition to the five light filters, DECam also has five optical lenses, the biggest of which is more than 3 feet wide and weighs 388 pounds.
Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/SMASH/D. Nidever (Montana State University); Acknowledgment: Image processing: Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani, and Davide de Martin
This image shows a wide-angle view of the Small Magellanic Cloud. The Large and Small Magellanic Clouds are dwarf satellite galaxies to the Milky Way, and their proximity makes them a valuable place to study star formation. The Dark Energy Camera captured deep looks at our galactic neighbors for the Survey of the Magellanic Stellar History or SMASH.
Credit: Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; Image processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), J. Miller (Gemini Observatory/NSF’s NOIRLab), M. Zamani and D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
The large galaxy at the center of this image is NGC 1515, a spiral galaxy with several neighboring galaxies in the Dorado Group. When looking at the large-scale structure of the universe, astronomers find galaxies are not distributed randomly but instead cluster together, forming a sort of cosmic web. The Dark Energy Survey has made some of the most-precise maps of the universe’s structure and its evolution over time.
Credit: Robert Gruendl, Dark Energy Survey
NGC 288 is a globular cluster of stars located about 28,700 lightyears from Earth. These stars are bound together by gravity and are concentrated toward the center of the sphere. Globular clusters are an interesting way to study how stars and our own Milky Way evolved, though the Dark Energy Survey looks at distant galaxies and galaxy clusters to better understand dark energy.
Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA; Acknowledgments: PI: M. Soraisam (the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign/NSF’s NOIRLab); Image processing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), M. Zamani (NSF’s NOIRLab) and D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)
This Dark Energy Camera image shows light from Centaurus A, a galaxy more than 12 million lightyears away. It is partially obscured by dark bands of dust caused by the collision of two galaxies.
Credit: DES/DOE/Fermilab/NCSA and CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; Acknowledgments: Image processing: DES, Jen Miller (Gemini Observatory/NSF’s NOIRLab), Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani and Davide de Martin
The Dark Energy Survey has found several new dwarf galaxies and used the data to limit how big potential dark matter particles could be. This irregular dwarf galaxy, IC 1613, is about 2.4 million lightyears away and contains around 100 million stars. Dwarf galaxies are considered small and faint by astronomical standards; for comparison, our Milky Way galaxy is estimated to contain between 100 and 400 billion stars.
Credit: Rob Morgan, Dark Energy Survey
The Helix Nebula (NGC 7293) is a planetary nebula about 650 lightyears from Earth. It is shown here extending over several of the Dark Energy Camera’s CCDs. Planetary nebulae, so named because they appeared round and sharp-edged like planets, are actually the remains of stars. Here, a dying star has ejected its outer layers, leaving a small white dwarf surrounded by gas. In billions of years, our own sun will experience a similar fate.
Credit: Dark Energy Survey
The spiral Sculptor Galaxy is about 11 million lightyears away. It’s one of more than 500 million galaxies imaged by the Dark Energy Survey across 5000 square degrees of sky. To optimize observations, DES used automated software to point the camera and capture exposures. The software could factor in what part of the sky was overhead, weather conditions, moonlight and which areas had been recently imaged.
Credit: DES/DOE/Fermilab/NCSA & CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA; Acknowledgments: Image processing: DES, Jen Miller (Gemini Observatory/NSF’s NOIRLab), Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani and Davide de Martin
The wispy shells around the elliptical galaxy NGC 474 (center) are actually hundreds of millions of stars. To the left is a spiral galaxy, and in the background, there are thousands of other, more distant galaxies — visible in this zoomable version. DECam images contain vast amounts of information; each one is about a gigabyte in size. The Dark Energy Survey would take a few hundred images per session, producing up to 2.5 terabytes of data in a single night.
Credit: Dark Energy Survey
The Dark Energy Camera captured the barred spiral galaxy NGC 1365 in its very first photographs in 2012. The galaxy sits in the Fornax cluster, about 60 million lightyears from Earth. This close-up comes from the camera’s much wider field of view, which you can explore in the interactive DECam viewer.
