The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: 100,000 starburst galaxy redshifts

The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey is an Australian-led large project on the AAT, which will measure some 200,000 spectroscopic redshifts of distant emission-line galaxies with the AAOmega spectrograph. The aim of the project is to determine the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) imprinted on the spatial distribution of the galaxies. The BAO scale is a standard ruler that can be used to measure cosmic distances. Our BAO determination will be accurate to 2 per cent and will constrain theories of dark energy. In this article we describe the design and initial results of the project, which started in Semester 2006B and is scheduled to finish observations in 2010A.