HETDEX Opens Massive Cosmic Dataset to Scientists, Novices, and AI
June 3, 2026
Today, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) – which recently completed the largest survey ever taken of the early universe – has released all of its immense, information-rich database to the public. Built from more than half a petabyte […]
Read MoreTeaching Machines to See the Distant Universe
May 1, 2026
With help from thousands of citizen scientists, a new AI model is learning to spot real galaxies hidden in noisy HETDEX data. Some of the most exciting galaxies in HETDEX start out looking like almost nothing: a faint bright spot […]
Read MoreAstronomers Thought the Early Universe Was Full of Hydrogen. Now They’ve Found It.
April 6, 2026
Astronomers using data from the Hobby–Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) have discovered tens of thousands of gigantic hydrogen gas halos, called “Lyman-alpha nebulae,” surrounding galaxies 10 billion to 12 billion years ago. Known as Cosmic Noon, this is an epoch in […]
Read MoreA Sea of Light: HETDEX Astronomers Reveal Hidden Structures in the Young Universe
March 3, 2026
Astronomers with the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX), have used data from the project to make the largest, most accurate 3D map yet of the light emitted by excited hydrogen in the early universe, 9 billion to 11 billion […]
Read MoreSerendipitous Supernovae found in HETDEX data with machine learning
May 18, 2023
In their recent article published in Astrophysical Journal titled “Searching for Supernovae in HETDEX Data Release 3″, University of Texas at Austin researcher József Vinkó and HETDEX team members describe a novel technique to discover Supernovae hidden within the massive […]
Read MoreGalaxy Goldmine, including 50 thousand distant galaxies, revealed in HETDEX’s first publicly released source catalog
April 26, 2023
Astronomers have barely scratched the surface of mapping the nearly endless stars and galaxies of the heavens. Using supercomputers, researchers with The University of Texas at Austin have now revealed the locations of more than 200,000 new astronomical objects. Their […]
Read MoreVolunteers Help Identify Nearly a Quarter-Million Galaxies
December 2, 2022
Astronomers on a historically ambitious and massive galaxy-mapping mission have activated more than 10,000 amateur scientists in 85 countries to help in their quest. Now they hope to significantly scale up their volunteer force for a unique project that could […]
Read MoreHETDEX Project On Track to Probe Dark Energy
December 30, 2020
Three years into its quest to reveal the nature of dark energy, the Hobby-Eberly Telescope Dark Energy Experiment (HETDEX) is on track to complete the largest map of the cosmos ever. The team will create a three-dimensional map of 2.5 […]
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