UA researchers among team releasing results from culmination of Dark Energy Survey

The Dark Energy Survey is an international project to map hundreds of millions of galaxies and star explosions to get a better understanding of how the universe is expanding.

The team just released the culmination of its data using all the methods of measuring cosmic expansion.

Researchers gathered observations over six years to narrow down theoretical models. That’s because the thing that’s driving the increasing expansion of the universe is not understood, that’s why it’s called “dark energy.”

“We could also call it mysterious-maybe stuff," said Elisabeth Krause with the University of Arizona, who worked on the survey team as someone who focused on bridging the observations with predictions for how dark energy works.

She says the new data includes observations on the curvature of space due to gravity.

"That allows us to probe how much matter there is between us and those galaxies. So that means we can now probe how structures in the universe grow over time," Krause said.

She says the findings provide better parameters for scientific models to follow on how the universe behaves.

“To understand how dark energy evolves in time or if it doesn't, and whether it is smoothly distributed across the universe or somehow clumped together," Krause said.

The new paper was submitted for publication, which could take the better half of a year.