What astronomers do

I'm working on a huge project for my day job right now, and it involves writing a lot of basic material about dark energy. I'm supposed to be brief, but how do you concisely describe dark energy? You can't. Even at 900 words I think I'm giving it too short a treatment. I'll forgo the details about dark energy is for now because it's not directly related to what I want to say here --and anyway, when the project is done I'll be able to link to it. In the course of reading up on DE so that I understand it well enough to explain it simply (ha! Sure!), I came across a technical paper called Measuring Cosmology with Supernovae. It's written by Saul Perlmutter and Brian Schmidt, two astronomers. But not just any two astronomers! They were the heads of their respective teams, both of which independently figured out ...