Researchers at The Ohio State University played a major role in analyzing the first year of data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument’s survey into the history of the universe.

With 5,000 tiny robots in a mountaintop telescope, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collects and measures light from faraway space objects, granting scientists the ability to peer 11 billion years into the past. Studying how the cosmos evolved is important to understand how it began and might end, and opens up further questions about dark energy, an unknown ingredient causing our universe to expand faster and faster. 

To study dark energy’s effects over the last 11 billion years, DESI recently created the largest 3D map of the universe ever constructed, marking the first time that scientists have measured the expansion history of the universe in that early period. Such precise results have revealed unprecedented new hints about how the young universe might have evolved.

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Researchers have used the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument to make the largest 3D map of our universe and world-leading measurements of dark energy, the mysterious cause of its accelerating expansion. DESI has made the largest 3D map of our universe to date. Earth is at the center of this thin slice of the full map. In the magnified section, it is easy to see the underlying structure of matter in our universe.  Claire Lamman/DESI collaboration; custom colormap package by cmastro.