The area of sky DES-GW members observe is very large - 700 square degrees of sky, or about 2,800 times the size of the full moon - and requires rapid image processing. Unfortunately this time we did not see anything, but we are now much better prepared when LIGO becomes active again later this year.” How to find a needle in a universe-sized haystack “Since we have experience detecting things through magnetic emissions, we coordinated with LIGO to find a source that we would find useful in our own research. “Our focus primarily is the search for dark energy,” says Marcelle Soares-Santos, associate scientist at the US Department of Energy’s Fermilab. A subset of members known as the Dark Energy Survey-Gravitational Wave (DES-GW) group are using the camera and the Open Science Grid (OSG) to build on LIGO’s groundbreaking findings. Scientists at Fermilab and other institutions in the Dark Energy Survey use the camera to understand dark energy - a force scientists believe is helping the universe expand. So, LIGO scientists are coordinating their measurements with observations made by the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) on the Blanco Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. While LIGO, funded by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), can pick out the general direction of the source of gravitational waves, it can’t identify the exact location. (Check out our coverage of the historic LIGO announcement here.) Seeking the source Now, scientists are seeking the wave source. The detection confirmed Einstein’s proposal in his general theory of relativity. On September 14, 2015, gravitational waves were directly observed for the first time by both detectors of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory (LIGO). The Open Science Grid enables rapid processing of the dense DECam images.Dark Energy Camera (DECam) joins the hunt, sending cosmic images from Chile to scientists at Fermilab.LIGO's gravitational wave detection has sparked a hunt for the wave's source.
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