New data locates hundreds of millions of objects throughout space
A longstanding project designed to study dark energy throughout the cosmos has released a second data set showing 300 million objects throughout space, one of the largest data releases of its kind. Combined with an initial release, the survey has now cataloged about 700 million objects in the universe.
The data was released by the Dark Energy Survey, an international collaboration of about 500 scientists from the U.S., Europe and South America, to map hundreds of millions of galaxies and thousands of supernovae in an attempt to understand more about dark energy, the force that is causing the universe to expand. The Ohio State University has played a primary role in the survey from the beginning.