{"id":97959,"date":"2019-10-29T14:04:19","date_gmt":"2019-10-29T21:04:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/first-light-achieved-on-an-experiment-that-could-crack-the-mystery-of-dark-energy"},"modified":"2019-10-29T14:04:19","modified_gmt":"2019-10-29T21:04:19","slug":"first-light-achieved-on-an-experiment-that-could-crack-the-mystery-of-dark-energy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2019\/10\/first-light-achieved-on-an-experiment-that-could-crack-the-mystery-of-dark-energy","title":{"rendered":"\u2018First Light\u2019 Achieved on an Experiment That Could Crack The Mystery of Dark Energy"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/first-light-achieved-on-an-experiment-that-could-crack-the-mystery-of-dark-energy2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>As an astronomer, there is no better feeling than achieving \u201cfirst light\u201d with a new instrument or telescope. It is the culmination of years of preparations and construction of new hardware, which for the first time collects light particles from an astronomical object.<\/p>\n<p>This is usually followed by a sigh of relief and then the excitement of all the new science that is now possible.<\/p>\n<p>On October 22, the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.desi.lbl.gov\/\">Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI<\/a>) on the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.noao.edu\/outreach\/kptour\/mayall.html\">Mayall Telescope<\/a> in Arizona, US, achieved first light. This is a huge leap in our ability to measure galaxy distances \u2013 enabling a new era of mapping the structures in the Universe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As an astronomer, there is no better feeling than achieving \u201cfirst light\u201d with a new instrument or telescope. It is the culmination of years of preparations and construction of new hardware, which for the first time collects light particles from an astronomical object. This is usually followed by a sigh of relief and then the [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":513,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,1965,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97959","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-mapping","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97959","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/513"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97959"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97959\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97959"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97959"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97959"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}