After a particularly successful first campaign of tests and measurements, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has just successfully started its 5-year observing program.
After a particularly successful first campaign of tests and measurements, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has just successfully started its 5-year observing program.
Nearly 200 researchers were involved in collecting, processing and assembling images of half the sky to prepare for the start of observations by DESI, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which aims to solve the mystery of dark energy.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) published in July a complete analysis of the largest three-dimensional map of the Universe ever created, reconstructing the history of its expansion over a period of 11 billion years.
A team from IRFU's Department of Particle Physics (DPhP) has just conducted the most accurate study to date of the mass of cosmic neutrinos, including both standard model neutrinos and sterile neutrinos contributing to dark matter.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) is intended to make the spectroscopic survey of 35 million galaxies and quasars from 2020 onwards, to study precisely the properties of dark energy.
Neutrinos from the Big Bang have been traveling the Universe for more than 13 billion years. They are almost undetectable but their footprint on the formation of large structures in the Universe, such as galaxies, can be detected.
More than twenty years after the discovery of the acceleration of the expansion of the Universe, the nature of the physical phenomenon at the origin of this acceleration, called "dark energy", is still unknown.
Several decades after its discovery, dark matter remains enigmatic. Researchers from IRFU have tested three models of dark matter in which the formation of large structures was modeled using supercomputing.
An international team from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) has carried out the first large-scale spectroscopic analysis of quasars, and was able to create a full 3D map of the universe and its large structures as it was 6 billion years ago.
The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (Desi) will analyze the light emitted by 35 million galaxies and quasars at various times in the past of the Universe and up to 11 billion years to better understand dark energy.
The homogeneity of our universe is among the founding principles of cosmology—yet are we really sure that it is so? Until now, the main argument supporting the idea that it is homogeneous was based on a coherence test that implicitly used the homogeneity of the universe for its demonstration.
Astronomers at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) used 140,000 distant quasars to measure the rate of expansion of the Universe when it was only a quarter of its present age. This is the best measure of the rate of expansion at any time in the 13 billion years since the Big Bang.