Skip to main content
Collaboration

Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment

Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment

During three years of observations, HETDEX will collect data on at least one million galaxies that are 9 billion to 11 billion light-years away, yielding the largest map of the universe ever produced. The map will allow HETDEX astronomers to measure how fast the universe was expanding at different times in its history. Changes in the expansion rate will reveal the role of dark energy at different epochs. Various explanations for dark energy predict different changes in the expansion rate, so by providing exact measurements of the expansion, the HETDEX map will eliminate some of the competing ideas.

Visit the collaboration website

Name Role Affiliations Email Phone Office Centers Research topics
Robin Ciardullo Robin Ciardullo Faculty Astronomy rbc3@psu.edu +1 814 865 6601 525 Davey Laboratory CMA, CTOC Cosmic Surveys
Olivia Curtis Olivia Curtis Postdoc Astronomy ocurtis@psu.edu N/A 417A Davey Laboratory IGC Cosmic Surveys
Caryl Gronwall Caryl Gronwall Faculty Astronomy cag18@psu.edu +1 814 865 2918 417B Davey Laboratory CMA, CTOC Astrostatistics, Cosmic Surveys
Donghui Jeong Donghui Jeong Faculty Astronomy djeong@psu.edu +1 814 865 1117 518 Davey Laboratory CTOC Gravitational Waves
Greg Lukens Greg Lukens Graduate Student Astronomy gmlukens@psu.edu +1 814 865 0419 441 Davey Laboratory CTOC Cosmic Surveys
Name Role Affiliations Email Phone Office Centers Research topics
Will Bowman Will Bowman Graduate Student Astronomy bowman@psu.edu +1 814 863 9342 520 Davey Laboratory IGC Cosmic Surveys
About our wordmark
Monica Rincon Ramirez

The IGC wordmark was created by Monica Rincon Ramirez while she was a graduate student at the Institute. Monica enjoys drawing new connections between fundamental theory and observations. Her graduate work included general relativity, loop quantum gravity, and quantum fields in cosmological backgrounds; her thesis focused on effective quantum corrections to gravitational phenomena from spinfoams and applications to cosmology. She received her PhD in 2024.

The wordmark symbolizes the scope of research at the IGC. The base represents quantum gravity, evoking the quantum geometrical picture from spinfoams and loop quantum gravity — approaches studied at the Center for Fundamental Theory. The middle shows galaxies embedded in a smooth surface characteristic of spacetime in general relativity and the larger physical scales studied at the Center for Theoretical and Observational Cosmology. The top curves to an extreme representing a supermassive black hole accompanied by an energetic jet, with a binary black hole pair nearby — the high-energy phenomena studied at the Center for Multimessenger Astrophysics.