If you’re going to solve one of the
biggest mysteries in science, you’ll
need a suitably impressive piece of
equipment. This four-tonne digital
camera at the Cerro Tololo Inter-
American Observatory in Chile is
tasked with revealing the nature of
dark energy – the little-understood
entity that’s thought to be accelerating
the expansion of the Universe.
The Dark Energy Camera (DECam)
boasts 74 CCDs (charge-coupled
devices), totalling 570 million pixels.
Just like in conventional digital
cameras, these convert incoming
light into electrical signals. DECam,
however, uses specially designed
CCDs that are sensitive to the faint,
redshifted light emanating from
distant galaxies.
The camera is attached to the
Victor M Blanco Telescope and has
been carrying out a survey of the
southern sky since 2013. By 2018, it
will have recorded information from
300 million galaxies and thousands
of supernovae, helping scientists to
measure changes in the Universe’s
expansion (and dark energy) over the
past 14 billion years.
PHOTO: SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
Seeing in
the dark