A week ago the Dark Energy Survey released its long-awaited 3 years worth of data – the positions of 226 million galaxies! Along with that came a whole load of new science in 30 papers (!) – I dived into them and picked out all the highlights, plus I spoke to Dr. Alexandra Amon on the DES team about her results showing dark matter might be distributed more smoothly than. we thought.

You can follow Dr. Alexandra Amon on Twitter: https://twitter.com/astroalexamon
Or on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/astroalexamon/

My video on different theories of gravity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtfEz…
My video on the history of dark matter and all the evidence we have for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbE8B…

You can access the Dark Energy Survey data for free here: https://des.ncsa.illinois.edu/release…
And read all the 30 papers (again, for free!) describing it here: https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/des-…

Riess et al. (1998; first evidence for accelerating expansion) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/980520…
Caldwell et al. (2002; “phantom menace” dark energy) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/990816…
Riess et al. (2004; w=-1.02) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/astro-ph/040251…
WMAP collaboration (2013; w=-1.084) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1212.5226.pdf
Planck collaboration (2015; w = -1.006) – https://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.01589.pdf
DES collaboration; Abbott et al. (2021; w = -0.98) – https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/wp-c…
Amon et al. (2021; dark matter is smoother with S8 = 0.772) – https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/wp-c…

[Note these papers are all free to access!]

00:00 – Introduction
00:48 – What is the Dark Energy Survey?
01:36 – Why is it making a big galaxy map?
04:15 – What is dark energy?
05:20 – What can it tell us about dark matter?
07:28 – Fixing the crisis in cosmology?
08:43 – What happened this week?
10:16 – Result 1: constraining dark energy
14:46 – Result 2: smoother dark matter?
18:44 – Chat with Dr. Alex Amon
26:35 – Outro
27:21 – Bloopers

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📚 “Space: 10 Things You Should Know” – UK Edition: http://bit.ly/SpaceDrBecky

📚 US & Canada version: “Space at the speed of light” (same book, different title, with some beautiful illustrations): https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo…

📚 German translation “Das kleine Buch vom großen Knall” : https://www.dtv.de/buch/becky-smethur…

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🎧 Royal Astronomical Society Podcast that I co-host: podfollow.com/supermassive