The Dark Energy Survey: Status and first round of multi-probe cosmology results

The Dark Energy Survey (DES) is a six-year, 5000 sq. deg. observing program using the Dark Energy Camera on the 4m Blanco telescope at CTIO. I will describe the recent multi-probe cosmological analysis of weak lensing, large-scale structure, baryon acoustic oscillations, and supernovae Ia in the Universe. The analysis includes unprecedented measurements of weak gravitational lensing over the redshift range 0.2 to 1.3 to derive the most precise such cosmological constraints to date. These DES results from the low-redshift Universe are consistent with those from the cosmic microwave background (CMB) and support the standard cosmological model, LCDM. In the coming year, DES will produce significantly tighter constraints on cosmology through similar analyses using observations over three times the sky-area and I will comment on improvements over current analyses.

Speaker: Michael Troxel, Duke Univ.