The image above is the first picture taken by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera, named DECam, regarded as the world’s most powerful camera. It is located at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile; its function is to survey the sky as part of the Dark Energy Survey mission, designed to find out why the expansion of the universe is speeding up.
Over the next five years, the DECam will be taking images of distant galaxies and stars. This information will be processed and analyzed by an international team of researchers. Their goal, according to the Dark Energy Survey website, is to measure ‘the 14-billion-year history of cosmic expansion with high precision.’ That way they might be able to understand cosmic acceleration, which contradicts Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity (by which universe’s expansion should be slowing down).
Want to know how the camera looks like? Check the picture below, which shows a prototype of the DECam.
Credit: Fermilab
The camera is mounted on the Victor M. Blanco telescope, so the final result should look something like the image below.
Credit: CTIO/AURA/NSF
Source: The Dark Energy Survey
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