Behold the brilliance of this cosmic snapshot obtained via the 520-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) instrument engineered by the US Department of Energy and installed on the Victor M. Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory (CTIO) in Chile.
Credit: CTIO/NOIRLab/DOE/NSF/AURA. Acknowledgment: M. Soraisam (University of Illinois). Image processing: Travis Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage), Mahdi Zamani & Davide de Martin
A program run by the NSF’s NOIRLab, DECam’s primary objective had been to map the structures of hundreds of millions of galaxies between 2013-2019 to hopefully glean new data on the mysterious phenomenon known as dark energy. This invisible force remains an enigma to astrophycists who believe it to be a guiding hand in accelerating the rate of expansion in the universe.