Department of Physics and Astronomy faculty, research staff, and students have been contributing to the global effort to better understand dark matter and dark energy. Professors Gary Bernstein, Bhuvnesh Jain, and Masao Sako, along with department researchers and students, have been working on the Dark Energy Survey, a global collaboration that includes over 400 scientists. DES recently announced they had completed an "analysis of the survey’s first three years of data, which includes the most precise 3D map of the universe to date, is a key step towards ongoing efforts to measure the distribution of dark matter and dark energy to see if data are consistent with the standard cosmological model."
Prof. Jain commented on the collaboration within the department saying: "Here at Penn, we are fortunate to have had a brilliant group of students and postdocs who have led the analysis, spanning pixel level images to theoretical cosmological inference."