DESI Collaboration to Receive 2026 Berkeley Prize

• The DESI collaboration is being honored with the 2026 Berkeley prize for their work creating the largest 3D map of the universe, enabling the study of the effects of dark energy over cosmic time, and particularly for precise measurements of baryon acoustic oscillations when the universe was less than three billion years old.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) collaboration will receive the 2026 Lancelot M. Berkeley–New York Community Trust Prize for Meritorious Work in Astronomy. Bestowed annually since 2011 by the American Astronomical Society (AAS) and supported by a grant from The New York Community Trust, the Berkeley prize includes a monetary award and an invitationto give the closing plenary lecture at the AAS winter meeting. The 247th AAS meeting will be held in Phoenix, Arizona, from 4 to 8 January 2026. 

DESI is an international experiment with more than 750 researchers from over 70 institutions around the world and is managed by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley NationalLaboratory (Berkeley Lab). The state-of-the-art instrument, which captures light from 5,000galaxies simultaneously, was constructed and is operated with funding from the DOE Office of Science. DESI is mounted on the U.S. National Science Foundation’s Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory (a program of NSF NOIRLab) in Arizona.

DESI’s scientific goal is to constrain possible models of dark energy, the mysterious form of energy that is thought to dominate the universe's mass–energy content. Over a five-year period, the collaboration has mapped the locations of galaxies and quasars from our cosmic backyard out to 11 billion light-years away.

The DESI collaboration is being honored with the 2026 Berkeley prize for their work creating the largest 3D map of the universe, enabling the study of the effects of dark energy over cosmic time, and particularly for precise measurements of baryon acoustic oscillations as a function of redshift all the way to z = 2.3, when the universe was less than three billion years old.

Each year the three AAS Vice Presidents, in consultation with the Editor in Chief of the AAS journals, select the Berkeley prize winner for meritorious research published within the preceding 12 months. This year’s prize recognizes the DESI team for not one, but two articles in the past year. The first, published in February 2025 in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, presents results from the measurement of baryon acoustic oscillations — a pattern of subtle variations in the density of baryonic matter imprinted by sound waves traveling through the early universe — based on data from the first year of DESI operations. The second, released by the collaboration in March 2025, encompasses the first three years of DESI operations, analyzing asample of more than 14 million galaxies and quasars to test the leading cosmological model.

In addition to producing the largest-ever 3D map of the universe, the DESI collaboration's observations provide a valuable test of Lambda CDM, a model of our universe that contains ordinary matter, cold dark matter, and a cosmological constant that is associated with dark energy. Paired with other cosmological indicators such as supernovae, DESI data suggest that dark energy may not be constant after all and may instead fluctuate across cosmic time. This provides mounting evidence that revisions to our leading cosmological model are needed.

The Berkeley Prize will be accepted on behalf of the collaboration by Prof. Daniel Eisenstein (Harvard University) a member of the DESI Executive Committee and former DESI spokesperson. Eisenstein will give the prize lecture on Thursday afternoon, 8 January 2026, at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona.

The spanish institutions that participate in DESi are the Centro de Investigaciones Energéticas, Medioambientales y Tecnológicas (CIEMAT), the Instituto de Ciencias del Espacio (ICE-CSIC/IEEC), the Institut de Ciències del Cosmos de la Universitat de Barcelona (ICCUB), the Institut de Física d'Altes Energies (IFAE), the Instituto de Física Teórica (IFT-UAM/CSIC), the Instituto de Astrofísica de Andalucía (IAA) and the Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC).