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The astrophysics and observational cosmology group is
active in a variety of projects involving the study of galaxy
clusters, individual galaxies, sheets
and voids in the galaxy distribution, and large-scale structure in general.
The fundamental links between all these lines of research are that they provide clues to the nature of the
dark matter and energy as well as measuring the
fundamental parameters of cosmology.
To study these systems, we use a variety of techniques:
In addition, our group is working on problems in galaxy
evolution, time-variable
astrophysics, and alternate cosmologies.
We also have close links to the other Observational
and Experimental Cosmology groups, as well as to the
Theoretical Cosmology and High-Energy theory and Experiment groups
at Brown.
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This is a deep true color image of the sky taken with the Blanco 4m
telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
The image is generated by stacking three images taken through different
color filters to create a single color picture. The area covered by
this picture is 40 arcminutes by 40 arcminutes, or roughly 1.5 times the
size of the full Moon. This picture is of a blank region of the sky;
that is, if you looked at this region with your naked eye, you would not see
anything. The brightest object in the field (the star at the bottom right)
is about 8 times too faint to be seen with the naked eye.
The faintest objects detected are almost 100 million times fainter than that!
In all, about 150,000 different galaxies are visible in the picture, as well as about 3000 stars.
(Click Here for an enlarged scrollable
view of this picture)
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