Free Astronomy Magazine

43 ASTRO PUBLISHING T he interacting galaxy pair NGC 1512 and NGC 1510 take center stage in this image from the Dark Energy Camera, a state-of-the art wide-field imager on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at Cerro Tololo Inter-American Ob- servatory, a Program of NSF’s NOIRLab. NGC 1512 has been in the process of merging with its smaller galactic neighbor for 400 million years, and this drawn- out interaction has ignited waves of star formation and warped both galaxies. [Dark Energy Survey/DOE/FNAL/DECam/CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA. Image process- ing: T.A. Rector (University of Alaska Anchorage/NSF’s NOIRLab), J. Miller (Gemini Observatory/NSF’s NOIRLab), M. Zamani & D. de Martin (NSF’s NOIRLab)] ! entists and engineers built a ‘tele- scope simulator’ — a replica of the upper segments of the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope — that al- lowed them to thoroughly test DECam before shipping it to Cerro Tololo in Chile. DECam was created to conduct the Dark Energy Survey (DES), a six-year observing campaign (from 2013 to 2019) involving over 400 scientists from 25 institutions in seven coun- tries. This international collabora- tive effort set out to map hundreds of millions of galaxies, detect thou- sands of supernovae, and discover delicate patterns of cosmic struc- ture — all to provide much-needed details of the mysterious dark en- ergy that is accelerating the expan- sion of the Universe. Today DECam is still used for programs by scien- tists from around the world con- tinuing its legacy of cutting-edge science.