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Science magazine has a nice article about dark energy by Adrian Cho. But you can't read it unless you subscribe. Except that the nice folks at UC Davis have decided that the article is nice publicity for Tony Tyson and the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, so they've put the article online for free. See Mark's post for some of the theoretical background. The LSST is an ambitious project -- a proposed giant telescope with a wide-field camera that scans the sky in real time. Every three nights it will complete a survey of the visible sky, providing unprecedented access to astrophysical phenomena in the time domain -- supernovae, asteroids, variable stars, you name it. It will probe dark energy in at least two ways: using Type Ia supernovae as standard candles (which is how the acceleration of the universe was first discovered), and by measuring cosmic structure via weak gravitational ...