South Pole Telescope data shedding light on dark energy

Results provide fresh support for Einstein's cosmological constant Analysis of data from the 10-meter South Pole Telescope is providing new support for the most widely accepted explanation of dark energy, the source of the mysterious force that is responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe. The data strongly support Albert Einstein's cosmological constant - the leading model for dark energy. The results also are beginning to hone in on the masses of the neutrinos, the most abundant particles in the universe, which until recently were thought to be without mass. A series of papers detailing the SPT findings have been submitted to the Astrophysical Journal. "The results released to date are just the beginning of what we'll be able to accomplish with the South Pole Telescope - the present analyses are based on only 100 of the over 500 galaxy clusters we've detected so far. We can expect much tighter constraints on dark energy and the neutrino masses with the full data set," said McGill University physics professor Gil Holder. McGill Matt Dobbs, postdoctoral scientist Keith Vanderlinde, and graduate student Tijmen de Haan recently returned from the geographic South Pole after having installed on the telescope a new detector readout system, developed and built at McGill, the only Canadian university partner in the project.