Event

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a collaboration between UPenn and 15 other institutions in 7 countries to construct and operate a new 500 megapixel CCD camera on the venerable 4-meter Blanco telescope in Chile. Its five-year mission: to survey 1/8 of the night sky in search of clues to the cause of the accelerating expansion of the Universe. I will review the multiple pathways that DES uses to convert sky images into measures of the dark Universe, and focus on the recent results obtained with the weak gravitational lensing and supernova methods that have major contributions from Penn researchers. DES is also having a major impact on astrophysical questions beyond dark energy, such as the contents of the outer Solar System, the cross-section of the dark-matter particle, the relic structures in the Milky Way halo, and the optical counterparts of gravity-wave sources.