The Mayall Telescope, USA, will carry out one of three imaging surveys for DESI. Credit: P. Marenfeld & NOAO/AURA/NSF
Our physicists will help create a 3D map of galaxies to learn more about the universe's accelerating expansion. Durham University is a member of the £80million ($100million) multinational Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project that will target about 33 million galaxies and 2.4 million quasars. DESI will measure these objects at different wavelengths of light to show how far and how quickly they are moving from Earth. Galaxies and quasars Five thousand swivelling robots will gather light from the galaxies and quasars so it can be split into colours and analysed using spectrographs. The detailed map of galaxies will measure the universe's expansion history across 10 to 12 billion years. The data will also provide new information about how galaxies like the Milky Way formed out of primordial clouds emerging from the Big Bang and may even reveal hints to the nature of the dark matter. We know the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate because objects in space are moving away from us.
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