Spring brings new life to Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory as calving season begins for the lab’s herd of American bison. Today, two bison calves were born at Fermilab. The lab has a long tradition of providing habitat for bison, connecting particle physics research to the Midwestern prairie. This season, 20 baby bison are expected.
The Dark Energy Survey has measured the BAO scale when the universe was half its present age with an accuracy of 2%, the most accurate determination yet at such an early epoch. It is the first time an imaging-only measurement is competitive with large spectroscopy campaigns specifically designed to detect this signal.
In the culmination of a decade’s worth of effort, the DES collaboration of scientists analyzed an unprecedented sample of more than 1,500 supernovae classified using machine learning. They placed the strongest constraints on the expansion of the universe ever obtained with the DES supernova survey. While consistent with the current standard cosmological model, the results do not rule out a more complex theory that the density of dark energy in the universe could have varied over time.