The Dark Energy Survey

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a major international astronomical collaboration based in Arlington, Virginia, established in 2013 to investigate the accelerating expansion of the universe and the nature of dark energy, which together with dark matter accounts for about 95% of the cosmos. The collaboration brings together more than 120 scientists from 23 institutions worldwide, pursuing a five-year survey of the southern sky with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam), a 570-megapixel digital imager mounted on the Blanco 4-meter telescope in the Chilean Andes. This instrumentation enables detailed mapping of cosmic expansion over 14 billion years, supporting fundamental cosmological questions about gravity, structure f...