After five years of mapping the sky in 3D - an area that stretches from Earth's front porch to about 11 billion light-years away - researchers at the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) project are pausing for a moment of appreciation from their peers.
In January, DESI - which includes researchers from 70 institutions across the world, including Yale - will receive the American Astronomical Society's 2026 Lancelot M. Berkeley Prize for meritorious work in astronomy. The prize honors not only DESI's efforts at creating the largest 3D map of the universe, but also its goal of learning more about dark energy.
Dark energy is an unseen, theorized energy that physicists say may account for three-quarters of the mass-energy content in the universe. Dark energy does not emit light or any other radiation that we can observe, and any information about its nature comes from indirect methods, such as surveying the distribution of far-off galaxies in three dimensions.
This is where DESI comes in. Using the 4-meter Mayall Telescope at Kitt Peak Observatory in Arizona, DESI captures light from 5,000 galaxies simultaneously and has mapped the locations of more than 30 million galaxies and quasars across one-third of the sky.
The U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory manages DESI, which includes 750 researchers.
"DESI has worked wonderfully well so far," said Charles Baltay, the Eugene Higgins Professor Emeritus of Physics and Astronomy in Yale's Faculty of Arts and Sciences and a co-founding researcher at DESI. "We're even slightly ahead of schedule."
