From Stanford University Press
Menlo Park, Calif. — Astrophysicists have a fairly accurate understanding of how the universe ages: That’s the conclusion of new results from the Dark Energy Survey (DES), a large international science collaboration, including researchers from the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, that put models of cosmic structure formation and evolution to the most precise test yet.Read more: https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2017-08-03-standard-model-universe-withstands-most-precise-test-dark-energy-survey.aspxThe survey’s researchers analyzed light from 26 million galaxies to study how structures in the universe have changed over the past 7 billion years – half the age of the universe. The data were taken with the DECam, a 570-megapixel camera attached to the 4-meter Victor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
Previously, the most precise test of cosmological models came from measurements with the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite of what is known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB) – a faint glow in the sky emitted 380,000 years after the Big Bang.
“While Planck looked at the structure of the very early universe, DES has measured structures that evolved much later,” said Daniel Gruen, a NASA Einstein postdoctoral fellow at the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC), a joint institute of Stanford University and SLAC. “The growth of these structures from the early ages of the universe until today agrees with what our models predict, showing that we can describe cosmic evolution very well.”
Gruen will present the results, which are based on the first year of data from the 5-year-long survey, today at the 2017 Division of Particles and Fields meeting of the American Physical Society at the DOE’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
KIPAC faculty member Risa Wechsler, a founding member of DES, said, “For the first time, the precision of key cosmological parameters coming out of a galaxy survey is comparable to the ones derived from measurements of the cosmic microwave background. This allows us to test our models independently and combine both approaches to obtain parameter values with unprecedented precision.”
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