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Decam

All articles tagged with #decam

space26 days ago•71 min saved

Cosmic Hat on Display: The Sombrero Galaxy Revealed

Space.com spotlights Messier 104, the Sombrero Galaxy, a spiral galaxy about 28 million light-years away in Virgo whose distinctive wide, hat-like disk earns it its nickname. The image was captured with the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Blanco 4-meter telescope at Cerro Tololo, part of NOIRLab, and the galaxy hosts roughly 2,000 globular clusters. It’s too faint to see with the naked eye, though binoculars or a small telescope reveal its silhouette. This piece marks Space photo of the day for April 29, 2026.

via Space|

#astronomy #decam #messier-104

space4 months ago•75 min saved

Sharper dark‑energy map tightens cosmic clues while hinting at clustering mysteries

Six years of DES data from the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Blanco telescope, spanning 758 nights and about 669 million galaxies, were analyzed using four probes—Type Ia supernovae, weak gravitational lensing, galaxy clustering and baryon acoustic oscillations—to dramatically tighten constraints on dark energy and the expansion of the universe. The results largely align with LCDM and the wCDM model, but reveal a tension in how matter clusters today compared with early-universe predictions, hinting at potential new physics as DES plans to combine its data with observations from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s LSST for even clearer cosmic maps.

via Space|

#cosmology #dark-energy #dark-energy-survey