Enjoy These First Images From the World's Most Powerful Camera

The Dark Energy Camera is just what it sounds, and then even a bit more. Located on a mountaintop in Chile, the phone booth-sized 570 megapixel camera, the tool of the

Dark Energy Survey

collaboration, is designed to look eight billion years back in time/across the universe, snapping images of some 100,000

galaxies

in every shot. The anticipated result is the largest galaxy survey ever taken, cataloging an expected 300 million galaxies, 100,000 galaxy clusters, and 4,000 supernovae. And hopefully in the process the vast amounts of data will provide some clues about dark energy.

A quick dark energy refresher. The expansion of the universe should be slowing down — all of the vast amounts of gravity put forth by the some 130 billion galaxies in the universe should be pulling everything together. But it’s not. In fact, the expansion of the universe is speeding up. Something is pushing everything away from everything else, and someday we’ll be alone in our own observable universe, adrift in the most nothing nothingness in creation. Earth should be long gone by then, but, in the meantime, humans are left with the mystery. This unseen force currently tearing the universe apart is what we call dark energy.

We have some ideas about what dark energy is — the energy of empty space, broadly — but we’re not exactly nailing anything to the wall, a la the Higgs boson. The DEC will perform four different dark energy probes: studying galaxy clusters, supernovae, the large-scale clumping of galaxies, and weak gravitational lensing. The camera will remain in the testing stages until the end of the year, when the experiments, led by the United States’ Fermilab, begin.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.