posted by elvis_crabs #
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Located high in the mountains of the Atacama Desert of northern Chile (one of the most arid regions in the world), the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory is an array of telescopes and scientific instruments that was founded in 1963 by Chileans and Americans.
Most recently, a phone box-sized Dark Energy Camera (or DECam) has been mounted on the 4m Victor M. Blanco telescope. The purpose of the 570-million-pixel camera is to scan some 300 million galaxies in the coming five years for evidence of dark energy.
The camera is comprised of 62 separate CCDs, the same kind of detector in consumer cameras. By doing some fancy stuff with a computer model and measuring red-shifting of an expanding galaxy paired with echoes of the Big Bang, the DECam should help to isolate and quantify dark energy. Simple as that...
