The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

by Richard Panek

They calculated that if they looked not at one galaxy at a time but at clusters of galaxies, they could beat the once-a-century-per-galaxy odds of finding the right kind of supernova. They selected clusters with well-established distances. And they timed their searches carefully, choosing the nights just before and after a new moon so that they were able not only to capitalize on dark skies but to compare images about twenty days apart, a period that, through happy coincidence, corresponds to the natural life (or, more aptly, death) cycle of the kind of supernova they wanted. They found one. Possibly a second, on what would be their final night of observing, though they didn’t bother to follow up that detection. They were ahead of their time, and, after two years, their time was up. Their telescope turned out to be too small for their purposes, their rate of discovery too low. Unless they could garner access to a larger telescope and a more powerful detector, they would need dozens of years to collect a suitable sample. Even at the rate of one good supernova a year, they would still need ten years, minimum, to complete their program.