Texas telescope joins hunt for dark energy
With a $42 million upgrade, the University of Texas’ McDonald Observatory is helping tackle one of the universe’s dark mysteries.
Dark energy is a mysterious force that astronomers haven’t detected, don’t understand and can explain only in the vaguest terms as the reason for the universe’s expansion.
Even Karl Gebhardt, one of the world’s foremost astronomers — a man who discovered the largest black hole ever observed — has no idea what dark energy actually is.
But he is hoping a $42 million upgrade to the main telescope at the University of Texas’ McDonald Observatory will help him and his colleagues find some answers.
“We are going to do a giant survey of the universe,” Gebhardt said as he stood among the Davis Mountains of West Texas and the dome housing the newly remade Hobby-Eberly Telescope. The fouryear project, which Gebhardt is leading, will use the upgraded telescope to look for dark energy.
“Dark energy is one of the most important questions in all of science right now,” Gebhardt said. “It has implications for where (the universe) comes from, where it’s going and how life on Earth was actually created in the first place, because it helps us to understand how a galaxy is made.”
Astrophysicists, being astrophysicists, like to explain the universe in mathematical terms, and in the late 1990s, they came close to crafting a formula to explain why the universe is expanding.
They had already solved one particularly vexing riddle. Sort of.
The prevailing theory held that galaxies should be moving faster in their center than at their edges, because that maelstrom of stars and dust in the center should be exerting a greater gravitational pull than the stuff spread out at the edges. But that wasn’t the case. The stuff at the edges of the Milky Way is moving just as fast as the stuff in the middle. The leading explanation is that the stuff making up the universe