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Hello and welcome to another episode of SciShow Breaking News.  Now, we've seen a lot of good photos come off the Curiosity Rover but in all the excitement, every once in a while, some 14-year-old chob will plop into the YouTube comments and be like, "My phone has a better camera than that!  Scientists are terrible!"

Well, leaving aside the tremendous set of delusions responsible for a suburban teenager believing that he can make informed decisions about interplanetary exploration, let's introduce him to the dark energy camera, the most powerful digital camera on Earth.

So there's this problem.  If you have a bunch of mass, in a universe, which we do, it should tend to contract toward itself, gravity doing that, you know.  Wel- at the very least, the expansion of the universe should be slowing down.  But instead, in 1998 scientists discovered that the expansion of the universe was speeding up, and then they just stood around and stared at each other for like five years because that's how confused they were.

Now there are two ways to explain this.
One: Einstein was wrong about general relativity, which, you know, his track record is pretty good on this stuff, so I'm not sure about that, OR, there must be some truly massive amount of energy that we just can't detect.
And when I say truly massive, I mean that it's about 75% of the universe.

But maybe, if we had a cryogenically cooled, 570 megapixel, red light sensitive camera mounted onto a 4 meter telescope at the top of a mountain in Chile, and that camera, taking enough photographs to fill your hard drive every twelve active hours, well, maybe that would just start to get us enough data to figure this out.

This camera, uh, it exists; the dark energy camera will survey a huge swath of the sky over the next five years.  Every photograph it takes will have tens of thousands of galaxies in it, and it will take 400 per night.  These photographs will be combined together into the fullest ever three-dimensional map of our universe.

120 scientists from 23 organizations will work together acquiring and analyzing these photographs, which should give us a much clearer picture of how the expansion of the universe occurred up until now, and give us insight into how dark energy is accelerating the expansion of the universe.

And the project begins...today, or yesterday, or tomorrow, or sometime around, right, like, NOW.
But of course it will be awhile before analysis starts to give us anything juicy to report, but we promise as soon as we hear something, you'll be the first to know, as long as you're subscribed to SciShow and looking out for more Breaking News.
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