Evrim Yazgin
Cosmos science journalist
An extraordinary new 3D map of the universe has been made available to the public.
A team using the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) and a supercomputer to try to better understand the mysterious phenomenon known as dark energy, created the largest 3D map of the universe as part of this endeavour. And it has just made this map publicly available.
The dataset includes information on 18.7 million objects. Among them are about 4 million stars, 13.1 million galaxies and 1.6 million quasars.
DESI’s main mission is illuminating dark energy – the proposed phenomenon behind the accelerating expansion of the universe. But DESI’s Data Release 1 (DR1) could also aid in other areas of astrophysics and cosmology including the evolution of galaxies, black holes, dark matter and the structure of the Milky Way.
“DR1 already gave the DESI collaboration hints that we might need to rethink our standard model of cosmology,” says Stephen Bailey, a scientist who leads data management for DESI and works at the US Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab).
“But these world-class datasets are also valuable for the rest of the astronomy community to test a huge wealth of other ideas, and we’re excited to see the breadth of research that will come out.”
“We’re still discovering all the things you can do with this dataset, and we want the community to be able to try out all their creative ideas,” adds Anthony Kremin, a project scientist at Berkeley Lab who co-led processing of the new data release. “There are endless kinds of interesting science you can do when you combine our data with outside information.”
DESI’s 5,000 “eyes” are mounted on the US National Science Foundation’s Nicholas U. Mayall 4-metre Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona.
The 270-terabyte dataset is a 10-fold expansion of DESI’s Early Data Release (EDR) of 2023.
DR1 includes information from the first year of the “main survey” between May 2021 and June 2022, as well as the 5-month “survey validation” where researchers tested the experiment.
DESI’s data release accessible through the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), a facility at Berkeley Lab where DESI processes and stores data. Keen space nerds can also explore some of DESI’s data through an interactive portal: the Legacy Survey Sky Browser.
