León, Guanajuato a 14 de julio de 2018.- Knowing what the matter and dark energy is are cosmology and astrophysics subjects, that Dr. Alma Xóchitl González Morales researches at Campus León of the University of Guanajuato (UG).

Dr. Xóchitl, a chair researcher at CONACyT (National Council of Science and Technology), commissioned at the Division of Sciences and Engineering for three years and a half now, is a graduate from the Universidad Iberoamericana and has a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Physical Sciences from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Ascribed to the Physics Department, she collaborates with Dr. Gustavo Niz Quevedo and Dr. Luis Arturo Ureña López with whom she participates in the project Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI).

In 2019, DESI will be held in the Mayall 4m telescope in the Kitt Peak Astronomical Observatory located in Quinlan Mountains, Arizona, in which universities from United States, Europe and Asia participate; in addition, they have the efforts from scientists of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Centro de Investigación y de Estudios Avanzados del Instituto Politécnico Nacional (Cinvestav) and from the Instituto Nacional de Investigaciones Nucleares (ININ).

This experiment that was planned just over ten years ago under the direction of Dr. Michael Levi, will measure the effect of dark energy in the expansion of the universe, will obtain optical spectra for tens of millions of galaxies and quasars, building a tridimensional map that covers the closest universe to 10 million light years.

In an interview, Dr. Alma Xóchitl González mentioned the importance of making this type of research since only 5% of the matter that exists in the universe is known and 95% corresponds to two of the great mysteries of the universe, it is about the matter and dark energy, she said.

"We know it exists because we have clues there is a lack of matter and energy, but we don't know what it is, so knowing what it is completes somehow our knowledge about the universe and it is something that humanity has searched from its beginning", she expressed.

She added that once they know more about their properties, they will be able to know if they can generate technology and applications.

She mentioned that the experiment "seeks to detect 30 million galaxies and quasars in approximately ten years [...] and from there we can start with the predictions we have been building during this whole process."

One of the instruments that will be installed is a spectrograph that will receive the light from galaxies so their spectrum can be recorded and registered, in addition of knowing its distance, type of galaxy, if it is spiral, elliptic, knowing what elements compose it will ease to trace the map of the distribution of the galaxies in the universe and make statistics, models and predictions to understand how the universe was formed, how it evolved and the role of the matter and dark energy.

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