Until the fall of 2008, the Joint Dark Energy Mission (JDEM) was a competition among satellite proposals named SNAP, DESTINY, and ADEPT. Now all will be combined in a spacecraft built by NASA, with help from the U.S. Department of Energy. DOE’s JDEM Project Office is headquartered at Berkeley Lab.

From COBE to Planck and beyond, the volume of data from measurements of the cosmic microwave background continues to grow by orders of magnitude. The Computational Cosmology Center, a collaboration between Berkeley Lab’s Physics Division and Computational Research Division, has algorithms and implementations in the works so NERSC’s supercomputers can handle the rising tide.

Humans have been star-gazing for thousands of years but the surprises keep coming. Berkeley Lab astrophysicists observed a mysterious object that grew increasingly bright for about 100 days then faded away to nothing over the next 100 days. Astronomers have never reported anything like it before and still don’t know what it was.