Shear brilliance: tackling the mystery of the dark universe

Discussion in 'Astronomy, Exobiology, & Cosmology' started by paddoboy, Nov 24, 2016.

  1. paddoboy

    paddoboy Valued Senior Member

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    Shear brilliance: Computing tackles the mystery of the dark universe
    November 24, 2016

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    Credit: University of Manchester
    Scientists from The University of Manchester working on a revolutionary telescope project have harnessed the power of distributed computing from the UK's GridPP collaboration to tackle one of the Universe's biggest mysteries – the nature of dark matter and dark energy.

    Researchers at The University of Manchester have used resources provided by GridPP – who represent the UK's contribution to the computing grid used to find the Higgs boson at CERN – to run image processing and machine learning algorithms on thousands of images of galaxies from the international Dark Energy Survey.

    The Manchester team are part of the collaborative project to build the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), a new kind of telescope currently under construction in Chile and designed to conduct a 10-year survey of the dynamic Universe. LSST will be able to map the entire visible sky.

    In preparation to the LSST starting its revolutionary scanning, a pilot research project has helped researchers detect and map out the cosmic shear seen across the night sky, one of the tell-tale signs of the dark matter and dark energy thought to make up some 95 per cent of what we see in the Universe. This in turn will help prepare for the analysis of the expected 200 petabytes of data the LSST will collect when it starts operating in 2023.



    Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-11-brilliance-tackles-mystery-dark-universe.html#jCp

    "Our overall aim is to tackle the mystery of the dark universe - and this pilot project has been hugely significant. When the LSST is fully operating researchers will face a galactic data deluge - and our work will prepare us for the analytical challenge ahead," said Sarah Bridle, Professor of Astrophysics.

    Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-11-brilliance-tackles-mystery-dark-universe.html#jCp
     
    paddoboy, Nov 24, 2016
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