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How supernovae are helping uncover the mysteries of dark energy

2024 may be the year for dark energy.

“To make these super precise measurements, you need the best cameras and the best telescopes available, on the ground or in space,” explained Maria Vincenzi of Duke University, who co-led the cosmological analysis of the DES supernova sample. That enabled the group to identify a huge sample of around 1,500 of these supernovae across the five-year dataset, collected from a single instrument called the Dark Energy Camera mounted on the Víctor M. Blanco Telescope in Chile. In fact, the predictions of quantum mechanics, the most widely held theory of how matter operates at the atomic scale, state that dark energy should be orders of magnitude stronger than it is.

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