Astronomers hate dust as much as the rest of us ― even more, perhaps. It’s one thing to get a little dust in your eye that takes your vision out of focus. Now imagine this kind of dust problem on a galactic scale where it hinders scientists trying to focus their telescopes into space.
That’s part of the challenge faced by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California, reports Space.com. They’re creating an instrument that will offer specific information on how fast the universe is growing.
This device ― the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument ― will create a map of over 30 million galaxies. But in order for that map to be precise, astronomers will have to correct for the problems created by all the dust particles in the Milky Way galaxy that impede their deep space investigations.