The Planck collaboration has released its first cosmological results, based on trillions of measurements of the cosmic microwave background. The results owe much to Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), including tens of millions of hours of massively parallel processing, plus the expertise of physicists and computational scientists in the Computational Cosmology Center (C3) who generated a quarter of a million simulated maps of the Planck sky, essential to the analysis.

A very special clock that can measure time on the basis of the mass of a single atomic or even subatomic particle holds promise not only for ultraprecise measurements of mass and time, but also for such exotic applications as testing Einstein’s general theory of relativity, or the effects of gravity on antimatter.
“We have directly [...]

In 2004 the Supernova Cosmology Project used the Hubble Space Telescope to find a tantalizing supernova that appeared to be almost 10 billion light-years distant. But Berkeley Lab scientists had to wait until a new camera was installed on the Hubble years later before they could confirm the candidate’s identity and redshift as a Type Ia “standard candle.” The spectrum and light curve of supernova SCP-0401 are now known with clarity; it is the supernova furthest back in time that can be used for precise measurements of the expansion history of the universe.

Researchers from Canada, California, and Poland have devised a straightforward way to test an intriguing idea about the nature of dark energy and dark matter. A global array of atomic magnetometers – small laboratory devices that can sense minute changes in magnetic fields – could signal when Earth passes through fractures in space known as [...]

Through UC Berkeley and the Berkeley Center for Cosmological Physics, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has made a $2.1 million grant to Berkeley Lab’s BigBOSS project. The grant funds the development of key technologies for modifying the 4-meter Mayall Telescope on Kitt Peak and constructing a precision instrument to study dark energy by mapping tens of millions of galaxies and quasars over the entire Northern Hemisphere sky.

By collecting tens of thousands of quasar spectra, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) has measured the large-scale structure of the early universe for the first time. Like backlights in the fog, the quasars illuminate clouds of hydrogen gas along the line of sight. No other technique can reach back over 10 billion years to probe structure at a time when the expansion of the universe was still decelerating and dark energy was yet to turn on.

Mounted on a telescope high in the Andes, the Dark Energy Camera (DECam) saw first light September 12. DECam’s half-billion-pixel focal plane is made of Berkeley Lab CCDs, descended from sensors developed for high-energy physics by Berkeley Lab scientists and engineers. Highly sensitive to the near-infrared region of the spectrum, Berkeley Lab CCDs are an essential component of the most powerful dark-energy survey instrument yet made.

Now freely available to the public: spectroscopic data from over half a million galaxies up to 7 billion light years away, over a hundred thousand quasars up to 11.5 billion light years away, and tens of thousands of stars and other astronomical objects in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey’s Data Release 9. This data is just the first year and a half of observation by BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey led by Berkeley Lab scientists. BOSS is the largest spectroscopic survey ever made to measure the evolution of large-scale galactic structure.

First spectroscopic results from BOSS, the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, give the most detailed look yet at the time when dark energy turned on. Over six billion light years distant, halfway back to the big bang, the expanding universe slipped from the grasp of matter’s mutual gravitational attraction. Dark energy took over, and expansion began to accelerate. BOSS is the largest component of the third Sloan Digital Sky Survey, led by scientists from Berkeley Lab.

Berkeley Lab scientists and their colleagues in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey have used visual data from nearly a million galaxies to derive the most accurate calculation yet of how matter clumps together – from a time when the universe was only half its present age until now. The results yield cosmic rulers to measure how the universe has expanded and to determine how much dark matter, dark energy, and even hard-to-detect neutrinos it contains.