April 11, 2024, Mike Peña, UC Santa Cruz
We now have the largest 3-D map of our cosmos ever created, thanks to a powerful instrument mounted atop a telescope in Arizona with a robotic array of 5,000 fiber-optic “eyes” that look into the night sky. Over the last five years, the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument—known in science circles as DESI—has measured the spectra of more than 30 million galaxies and 3 million quasars to determine how fast the universe expanded over 11 billion years.
