HETDEX Update

With some of its mirrors locked away in a cupboard and a package of instruments gone for good, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope is looking a bit bare these days. Over the coming months, though, it’ll be fleshed out as it’s prepared for a major new scientific project: a search for dark energy.

The search is known as HETDEX — the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment. Scientists will study more than a million galaxies that are billions of light-years away. That will reveal how the universe was expanding in the distant past. That, in turn, will help reveal the nature of dark energy, which is causing the universe to expand faster as it ages.

HETDEX requires an overhaul of the giant Hobby-Eberly Telescope at McDonald Observatory. New optics will give the telescope a much wider field of view, allowing it to see hundreds of galaxies at a time. And a new suite of instruments will analyze the light from those galaxies.

Astronomers took their last glimpses through the old telescope in Augus