Cosmic noon was the time to be a star-gazer in the universe. Each fortnight a new star formed in the galaxy. And every few years an old star blew its guts out across the sky in a flash of light brighter than all the stars in the galaxy.
Astronomers in the present universe spent five years from 2014 to 2019 staring back in time at these bright flashes of light, known as Type Ia supernovae, as part of the Dark Energy Survey (See Science Synergy post Shrinking Dark matter Makes Dark Energy). The light from cosmic noon that they saw tells a story about how space grows as time flows. And that star-gazer story agrees beautifully with the predictions of the 0.5 eV QCD axion cosmology discovered and developed by Science Synergy (See Science Synergy post Life Cycle of the Universe).
Spreading the starlight into a rainbow, the star-gazers in the Dark Energy Survey (DES) find a shift toward the red end of the spectrum. Known as the redshift, this spectral effect serves as a cosmic clock with cosmic noon falling around a redshift of one. Looking back towards cosmic noon, the DES team measured the distance to more than 1500 Type Ia supernovae in galaxies far, far away, and the DES distances land bang on top of the predictions based on the redshift-distance relation within the 0.5 eV QCD axion cosmology of Science Synergy.