The primary goal of the survey is to use gravitational lensing to study the amount of matter in the Universe, the clumping of the matter, and the evolution of the clumping. This will be used to help determine what type of Universe we live in, its beginning and its ultimate fate. The two major projects involve measurement of the amplitude of the gravitational lensing signal from Large Scale Structure, and the measurement of the galaxy cluster mass function at different redshifts. In addition, the images will be used for a wide range of projects studying the evolution of galaxies, the oldest stars in our galaxy, and distant quasars among others. As befits a survey-type program, the data is being made publicly available as the imaging is completed.
Finally, we are also studying how the sky varies in time. Because the observations of the separate regions take a large amount of telescope time, the observations can be spaced in time with intervals of minutes, days, months and years. Each observation can then be compared with the previous observations to see what has changed. Each run, we produce catalogs of asteroids, variable stars, and supernovae, and we are in a good position to observe rare phenomena such as Gamma-ray burst afterglows. With the recent great improvement in computational power and image differencing algorithms, it is now possible to do this in “real time“. This means that we have identifications of moving and varying objects within an hour of when the observation was taken, allowing prompt followup with Keck, Gemini, and other large spectroscopic telescopes.
For more complete information about the Deep Lens Survey, as well as for the data you can visit the official survey website at Bell Laboratories.
