Berkeley Labs, in collaboration with over 900 international researchers from more than 70 institutions, has released a dataset from its Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI), a telescope tool that collects data scientists need to make 3D maps of the universe. The dataset includes information on 18.7 million celestial objects, including 4 million stars, 13.1 million galaxies, and 1.6 million quasars—extremely bright, distant objects powered by black holes. The maps that scientists create using this data can help them study how the universe is expanding and investigate the role of dark energy, a mysterious force thought to be causing the expansion to speed up.
Image Credits: Jeremy Thomas
