La SILLA
The weather is still decent, despite a very variable seeing last night, so this is the menu tonight.
-2.2m: SM with WFI and FEROS
PARANAL: Good weather tonight, just a few very thin cirri.
All telescopes (I mean: all seven telescopes, 4 UTs and 3 ATs) are in Service Mode tonight. On our plate, among many other programs: Chris Lidman submitted a "Target of Opportunity" request to get observations of a distant supernova. Using these data, combined with similar observations of many other similar supernovae, he wants to constraint how much "dark energy" there is in the Universe. Just like the (in)famous "dark matter", that would constitute 90% of the mass in the Universe, the dark energy would constitute most of the energy in the Universe (70% or so). What it is? We don't know. But it seems that at very large scales (we are talking LARGE, here, i.e. the size of the Universe itself), the universe is expanding (that we know for sure - see red-shifts) at an accelerated rate. Needless to say it would be really good to know more about that energy - this is where Chris comes.
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