Five-year mission completed as dark matter research expands

COLUMBUS, Ohio – In pursuit of understanding the role dark energy plays in complex physics, researchers have marked completion of a major milestone: successfully surveying the entire target area in the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI)’s 3D map of the universe.

Finished ahead of schedule and armed with vastly more data than expected, researchers plan to use DESI’s map, which is the largest high-resolution 3D construct of the universe ever made, to explore dark energy, the fundamental ingredient that makes up about 70% of the cosmos.

In the five years since DESI began collecting data, the survey has observed more than 47 million galaxies and quasars and 20 million stars, and its results have already revealed much about the structure and evolution of the universe, said Paul Martini, the instrument scientist during DESI construction and commissioning and a professor of astronomy at The Ohio State University.

“DESI has been a superb international collaboration, and its incredibly fruitful scientific results are a leading example of its impact on the broader scientific community,” he said. 

“Ohio State made the largest contributions to the instrumentation, operations and analysis infrastructure of any university group in DESI,” said Klaus Honscheid, lead scientist of DESI instrument operations and a physics professor at Ohio State. “We are proud of our collaboration’s world-leading results on dark energy, as well as pleased with the substantial, international media attention they have received.”

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