10 Apr 2017

Two astrophysicists and a theoretical physicist discuss how the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope will probe the nature of dark matter and dark energy by taking an unprecedentedly enormous scan of the sky.

AT A MOUNTAINTOP CEREMONY IN CHILE, on April 14th, scientists and diplomats laid the first stone for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). This ambitious international astrophysics project is slated to start scanning the heavens in 2022. When it does, LSST should open up the "dark universe" of dark matter and dark energy—the unseen substance and force, respectively, composing 95 percent of the universe's mass and energy—as never before.

The "large" in LSST's name is a bit of an understatement. The telescope will feature an 8.4-meter diameter mirror and a 3.2 gigapixel camera, the biggest digital camera ever built. The telescope will survey the entire Southern Hemisphere's sky every few days, hauling in 30 terabytes of data nightly. After just its first month of operations, LSST's camera will have observed more of the universe than all previous astronomical surveys combined.
On April 2, 2015, two astrophysicists and a theoretical physicist spoke with The Kavli Foundation about how LSST's sweeping search for dark matter and dark energy will answer fundamental questions about our universe's make-up.

• Steven Kahn – is the Director of LSST and the Cassius Lamb Kirk Professor in the Natural Sciences in the Kavli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) at Stanford University.
• Sarah Bridle – is a professor of astrophysics in the Extragalactic Astronomy and Cosmology research group of the Jodrell Bank Center for Astrophysics in the School of Physics and Astronomy at The University of Manchester.
• Hitoshi Murayama – is the Director of the Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU) at the University of Tokyo and a professor at the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics at the University of California, Berkeley.

[Image]
An artist's rendering of the proposed architecture for the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope at its site on the El Peñón peak of Cerro Pachón in Chile.