A Snap Into The Future

Astronomers from the UK, US, Spain, Brazil and Germany have put together a 570 million pixel camera and it took it's first picture on the 12th of September; which focused on the Fornax Galaxy cluster.

The purpose of this truly big camera, the size of a telephone box, is to take pictures of many galaxy clusters and to discover the nature of dark energy. Dark energy is the thing which makes up 70% of our Universe and makes it expand faster, as you may know it's quite big already. Furthermore, it will hopefully picture up to 4,000 supernovae, which are dying stars, and help us understand what space is really made of. It is capable of detecting objects as far as eight billion light years away. The DECam has been placed in the Atacama desert in Chile. It has been named the worlds most powerful camera because of it's high sensitivity and ginormous resolution. This is a very exciting opportunity to look deeper into outer space and learn more about it, much, much more. Who knows what it may reveal?