Dark Energy Camera scans ancient skies

The Fermilab team that will use the Dark Energy Camera to peer deep into the dark includes, from left, physicists John Peoples, Brenna Flaugher, Juan Estrada and Tom Diehl.

Gazing into space, scientists wonder why the universe is expanding ever faster. What mysterious force is at work? By recording the light from hundreds of millions of galaxies from a mountaintop in Chile, they hope to find out what's going on.

Imagine a camera that takes pictures of the universe not only as we see it today but back through time, closer to when the universe began, capturing images of roughly 300 million galaxies.

At Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois, Brenna Flaugher and her colleagues are building such a device. Called the Dark Energy Camera, it will survey the skies of the Southern Hemisphere and peer far back in time, allowing scientists to see galaxies as they were when the universe was only a few billion years old.

The goal is to search for signs of dark energy-the ubiquitous, invisible substance believed to make up 70 percent of the universe.

-- Kristine Crane

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New employees - June 29

First row from left: Natalie Harrison, Zackary Knoll, Gina Castelvecchi, Ievgeniia Iedemska and Krishna Bathina. Second row from left: Matthias Jamison-Koenig, Melanie Roberts, Alex Irigoyen, Braven Leung, Liana Nicklaus and Orlando Marrero. Third row from left: Debra Jones, Ami Dave, Tyler Rehak, Nick Gebbia, Alex Fitch, Konstantin Gudima and Charles H. Volk III.

I'm a particle physicist. Want to chat?

From New York Times, July 13, 2009

I always laugh when people say they don't want to talk to their seatmates. I'm a friendly guy and, on occasion, I wouldn't mind having a chat with a fellow passenger, especially if I'm not that busy with work.

But when my seatmates ask what I do for a living, the usual response is, "Oh" or "Oh, that sounds hard" or "Oh, I couldn't possibly do that."

I'm a physicist, and there's a perception about physics that it's somewhat of a remote discipline. People would probably love to talk to a musician or a doctor, but it's a no-go when it comes to making small talk with me.

Which is kind of amusing. As a particle physicist, I could talk to you about black holes, alternate universes and even the so-called and unfortunately named "God particle," which is really something called the Higgs boson. If it actually exists and we find it, we would be able to explain the origin of mass in the universe.

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