Posted in: Misc gadgets, Various

Fermilab built a 570 megapixel camera to shoot the universe. Say cheese, dark energy!

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Fermilab built one of the biggest digital cameras in the world in order to understand the mysteries of the universe in their quest for dark energy. It has 74CCD sensors, it’s as big as a Mini Cooper (you call that big?) and costs $35 million.

But what are they going to do with it?

First of all, many of you may wonder what the dark energy is? It’s not something sourced from the Star Wars trilogy, it’s a scientific thing. Well, purely theoretical for now, but hopefully not for long now that they’re ready to take a shot at it!

Here are some fast facts though. After the Big Bang, the universe started expanding in all directions. After the first eight billion years instead of slowing down its expansion (by the laws of physics) seemingly out of nowhere the universe sped up its rate of expansion. So scientists believe it’s caused by the dark energy. It’s only that they don’t have any solid proof that this energy even exists.

Well this really big camera is here to help them out. The 570 megapixel thing will be mounted in Chile and its task will be to shoot more than 300 million galaxies over the next five years.

That should answer some hard Questions of Life, the Universe, and Everything else. Or at least I hope it would.

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