A groundbreaking new dataset containing information on 18.7 million celestial objects—the largest ever assembled—is now accessible to researchers, paving the way toward solving some of the universe’s greatest mysteries and potentially upending our currently accepted standard model of cosmology.
The trove of astrophysical data from the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) includes information on galaxies, quasars, stars, and other celestial objects, providing scientists with a new set of tools they hope to use to solve one of the greatest mysteries in modern cosmology: the question of dark energy.
“Elucidating the nature of dark energy and the physical mechanisms responsible for the accelerating expansion of the universe is one of the most important unsolved problems in physics and, arguably, all of science,” write members of the DESI collaboration, which unites more than 450 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world, in a new paper detailing the achievement.
In addition to helping solve the questions astrophysicists have about elusive dark matter, the new data will aid the DESI collaboration in resolving several other core scientific objectives, including questions about the gravitationally driven growth of large-scale cosmic structures and neutrino masses and obtaining observational signatures related to primordial inflation in distant regions of the cosmos.
DESI: An Effort of Cosmic Proportions
Designed to map millions of objects dispersed throughout the cosmos, DESI’s primary mission is to understand the cosmic forces driving the universe’s expansion.
Within the newly unveiled Data Release 1 (DR1), the collaboration has released the initial 13-month period in which DESI conducted its main survey, representing a significant step in advancing cosmological research.
The massive 270-terabyte dataset will provide potentially crucial information beyond DESI’s efforts to resolve questions about dark energy, extending to studies of galactic evolution, black holes and their formation, and the composition of the Milky Way. The data, which includes interactive visualization tools for public exploration, have been made accessible through the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) and includes interactive visualization tools for public exploration.
Accessibility to the new DESI data includes information collected from approximately 4 million stars, 13.1 million galaxies, and 1.6 million quasars, which will help astrophysicists learn about the supermassive black holes that power them. Additionally, the data builds on previous efforts that have already gleaned a significant amount of data on extragalactic objects, which, combined with the latest release, will now expand the total information by more than twice as much as all previous 3D spectroscopic surveys combined.
Upending the Standard Model of Cosmology
The new DESI data is already helping scientists discover important new insights. Stephen Bailey, a data management leader at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), says that DR1 could expand our knowledge of the cosmos and potentially challenge existing cosmological models.
“DR1 already gave the DESI collaboration hints that we might need to rethink our standard model of cosmology,” Bailey said in a statement announcing the new DR1 dataset.
With the technological advancements DESI has afforded astronomers, unprecedented new data and collection efficiency has been reached. By employing close to 5,000 fiber-optical “eyes,” the instrument can capture the light produced by 100,000 galaxies throughout a single night’s observation. This allows scientists to analyze how the light from these distant celestial features is redshifted as the universe expands, which helps them determine the distances of galaxies and reconstruct a 3D map covering the last 11 billion years.
Within its initial year in operation, DESI became the largest spectroscopic redshift survey ever undertaken, surpassing past surveys like the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s (SDSS) 25-year total, all within just a fraction of the time.
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Supercomputer Processing
The DR1 information was processed at NERSC’s Perlmutter supercomputer, which significantly increased analysis speeds, allowed researchers to engage in continuous model refinement, and helped facilitate a high level of accuracy in the cosmic mapping the collaboration produced.
Right now, DESI is in its fourth year of a five-year-long survey. By the end of that period, it hopes to catalog more than 50 million galaxies and quasars throughout the cosmos and make the findings widely accessible to academic institutions and research organizations.
“In addition to fulfilling its core cosmological objectives with unprecedented precision, we expect DR1 to enable a wide range of transformational astrophysical studies and discoveries,” the DESI collaboration members write in their recent paper describing DR1.
“We’re still discovering all the things you can do with this dataset,” said Anthony Kremin, a project scientist at Berkeley Lab. “There are endless kinds of interesting science you can do when you combine our data with outside information.”
The DESI DR1 paper, “Data Release 1 of the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument,” can be accessed right now on the DESI Data website and will be hosted on the arXiv preprint server. A listing of DESI publications can also be found here.
Micah Hanks is the Editor-in-Chief and Co-Founder of The Debrief. He can be reached by email atmicah@thedebrief.org. Follow his work atmicahhanks.comand on X:@MicahHanks.