Photographing the Invisible
Dave Greenfield | Date: 02-15-10 | Comments: 0
- The world's largest digital camera has been created to photograph something nobody can see and scientists aren't even sure exists.
A new digital camera is being engineered at Fermilab, near Chicago,
but this is one camera you don’t want to carry in your pocket. In your Mini
Cooper, maybe. A team of particle physicists and astronomers is working on the
570-megapixel camera with the aim of shooting a mysterious subject: dark
energy.
This mammoth camera has 74 CCD censors and costs $35 million
to complete. The core, which resembles a giant telescope, will fit inside an
enclosure that is, of course, the size of a Mini Cooper. It will be mounted to
a telescope in Chile
where it will map more than 300 million galaxies, offering an unprecedented and
intriguing look into the cosmos.
So, what are researchers hoping to see?
Dark energy. It is elusive, and scientists can’t even prove
that it exists because it is invisible. But it is conjectured that since the
Big Bang, the universe has steadily expanded. When confronted with the force of
gravity, the expansion accelerates instead of slows, and astronomers believe
that dark energy is the force that is causing this contrary reaction. They hope
to use the detailed images generated by the 570-mp beast to demonstrate how the
cosmos is growing, and give them some insight into the effect of dark energy.
The Dark Energy Camera, as it is known, is going to capture
an invisible subject by looking into supernovas and galaxies to get a glimpse
of the cosmos as seen a few billion years ago. Says Craig Hogan, Fermilab’s director
for the Center of Particle
Astrophysics, “It’s throwing the tools of the
digital age onto the old question of where we are.” And the answers may be
surprising. Some experts even believe that the data from the Dark Energy Camera
will provide evidence that challenges Einstein’s theory of relativity.
The massive camera is expected to go live in 2011 and begin
shedding light on dark energy.
