Jon Thaler
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Abstract:
Together, dark matter and dark energy comprise 96% of the energy density of the universe, yet we know very little about their properties. One promising astronomical technique is to survey large volumes of the universe, in order to learn the space and time structure of their distributions. I will describe one project, the Dark Energy Survey (DES). We propose to build a 500 megapixel camera for the 4 meter Blanco telescope in Chile and to survey about 1/8 of the sky to a redshift of about z=1.