Dark Energy Camera Shows Stars 352 Quintillion Miles Away
One of Fermilab's most prestigious projects since the shutdown of its Tevatron particle collider has been a stunning Dark Energy Camera (DEC), which is now delivering its first images.
The $50 million camera is combined with a 4-meter telescope and has been designed to scan the sky deep into space, into the history of our universe.
62 CCDs, each with a resolution of 9 megapixels deliver a total resolution of 570 megapixels. The first shots have been taken on September 12 and were published on September 17.
Fermilab posted images taken of the globular star cluster 47 Tucanae, located about 17,000 light years away - which translates to about 99.7 quadrillion miles. There are also breathtaking shots of the NGC 1365 galaxy, which is about 60 million light years, or 352 quintillion miles away.
Fermilab said it has access to the DEC for about 8-10 hours of 105 nights every year for the a time frame of 5 years. The scientists plan to take about 126,000 pictures total - and cover about 10 percent of the sky. They hope that they will be creating a database of the most detailed imagery ever taken of the sky, with an unprecedented opportunity to travel back into the history of the universe.
Ultimately, the scientists hope that they will find an answer to the question the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace.
Someday we'll figure out that we're riding on the back of an electron that's orbiting the nucleus of some exotic material that was created during someone else's atom-smashing experiments. The galaxies we observe as very large to us are someone else's subatomic particles.
Someday we'll figure out that we're riding on the back of an electron that's orbiting the nucleus of some exotic material that was created during someone else's atom-smashing experiments. The galaxies we observe as very large to us are someone else's subatomic particles.
Someone has been watching way too much men in black
Now, all we need to start doing now is building the USS Enterprise and spreading before humanity kills it self. Life is to short, I want to see it all!
For every billion particles of anti-matter, there was a billion +1 particles of regular matter. The entire universe consists of those tiny scraps left over after everything else cancelled each other out. Lucky for us there wasn't equal amounts of both or we'd never exist to contemplate it.
Did I mention cosmology for the win?
That generally happends to every post with substance in it unless an author or mod posts it, so don't worry too much about it.
The more I learn about the Universe the more I have the feeling that it is just a dream.
are you serious?
Assuming the universe is billions of years old, which I very much doubt. Evolutionists love this line.
The speed of light, believe it or not, isn't a constant, and in fact used to be much faster, which throws that theory out of the window.
How do you know that one?
Funny, I always thought the opposite; the Atoms we watch are someone else's star system.
Maybe we are both right and our existence is simple a step in the middle.