LOS ANGELES, April 16– The United States’ Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) has completed its five-year mission to produce the largest high-resolution 3D map of the universe ever made, aimed at studying dark energy and the expansion history of the universe.
The instrument, operated by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, has successfully mapped all of the sky it originally planned to survey, accomplishing the task ahead of schedule and capturing far more galaxies and stars than expected, according to a release published on Wednesday.
Designed to measure the spectra of 34 million galaxies and quasars over five years across two-thirds of the northern sky, DESI has instead mapped more than 47 million galaxies and quasars, along with 20 million stars in the Milky Way.
DESI is set to continue mapping the sky through 2028, expanding its survey area by about 20 percent — from 14,000 to 17,000 square degrees — and aiming to collect a total of 63 million extragalactic redshifts.
The extended survey will cover regions that are more challenging to observe, including areas closer to the plane of the Milky Way and regions further south. (Namibia Daily News/Xinhua)
