Anywhere on Earth this would be a big telescope, as tall as a seven-story building, with a main mirror measuring 32 1/2 feet across. But here at the South Pole, it seems especially large, looming over a barren plain of ice that gets colder than anywhere else on the planet.
Scientists built the instrument at the end of the world so they can search for clues that might identify the most powerful, plentiful but elusive substance in the universe: dark energy.
First described just nine years ago, dark energy is a mysterious force so powerful that it will decide the fate of the universe. Having already overruled the laws of gravity, it is pushing galaxies away from one another, causing the universe to expand at an ever faster rate.
Though dark energy is believed to account for 70% of the universe's mass, it is invisible and virtually undetectable. Nobody knows what it is, where it is or how it behaves.
"If you see it in your basement," jokes University of Chicago cosmologist Rocky Kolb, "you better get back on your medication." But he knows better than most the high priority the world's governments and scientists have placed on gaining a fuller understanding of the invisible force.
"Many think dark energy is the most important problem in physics today," said Kolb, who recently served as chairman of the Dark Energy Task Force, convened in 2005 by the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA and the National Science Foundation.
Figuring out what dark energy is would explain the history and future of the universe and generate new understanding of physical laws that, applied to human invention, almost certainly would change the way we live -- just as breakthroughs in quantum mechanics brought the computer chip.
Swinging its massive mirror skyward, the South Pole Telescope has begun to search the southern polar heavens for shreds of evidence of the elusive stuff. Controlled remotely from the University of Chicago, the $19.2-million telescope has quickly succeeded in its first mission: finding unknown galaxy clusters, clues to the emergence of dark energy.
Ambitious project
The Chicago university has a stronger astronomy presence at the pole than perhaps any other institution, having built several smaller experimental telescopes there over the last 20 years. This scope, however, was the most ambitious project by far.
