45-year-old US telescope to help scientists solve mystery of dark matter

(Representational image)

New Delhi: To aid scientists in solving the mystery of dark energy that is believed to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe, a 45-year-old telescope in the US will create the largest three-dimensional map of the universe.

The four-meter Nicholas U. Mayall Telescope, put inside a 14-story, 500-ton dome atop a mile-high peak, closed on Monday to have its largest-ever overhaul and set the stage for installing the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI).

Dark matter was one of the biggest secrets of the vast universe that was divulged in the 1970s.

It is a mysterious and as-yet-unobserved component. Its nature remains unknown, but scientists estimate that it is five times as abundant as ordinary matter throughout the universe.

The new instrument would begin a five-year observing run at Kitt Peak National Observatory after its installation next year, Xinhua reported.

Besides finding evidence about the universe's expansion, DESI would also help to set limits on theories related to gravity and the formative stages of the universe.

It could even provide new mass measurements for a variety of elusive yet abundant neutrinos, a kind of subatomic particles.

"One of the primary ways that we learn about the unseen universe is by its subtle effects on the clustering of galaxies," DESI Collaboration co-spokesperson Daniel Eisenstein of Harvard University was quoted as saying.

"The new maps from DESI would provide an exquisite new level of sensitivity in our study of cosmology," Eisenstein added.

The expansion of the telescope's field-of-view will allow DESI to map out about one-third of the sky.

Brenna Flaugher, a DESI project scientist who leads the Astrophysics Department at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, said: "Instead of one at a time we can measure the velocities of 5,000 galaxies at a time, we will measure more than 30 million of them in our five-year survey."

DESI's observations would provide a deep look into the early universe, up to about 11 billion years ago.

All of DESI's six lenses, each about a meter in diameter, are complete.

DESI will use an array of 5,000 swiveling robots, each carefully choreographed to point a fiber-optic cable at a pre-programmed sequence of deep-space objects, including millions of galaxies and quasars, which are galaxies that harbor massive, actively feeding black holes.

The cylindrical, fiber-toting robots, which will be embedded in a rounded metal unit called a focal plane, will reposition to capture a new exposure of the sky roughly every 20 minutes.

The fiber-optic cables will carry the light from these objects to 10 spectrographs, tools that will measure the properties of this light and help to pinpoint the objects' distance and the rate at which they are moving away from us.

Installation of DESI's components is expected to begin soon and to wrap up in April 2019, with first science observations planned in September 2019.

(With IANS inputs)