THE HUNT FOR DARK MATTER

Educational Game

Every massive object in the universe bends nearby rays of light. This gravitational lensing causes the images of distant galaxies to be distorted. Gravitational lensing is a powerful tool in modern cosmology. Cosmologists use the average distortion in measured galaxies to make maps of the matter in the universe, including the otherwise invisible dark matter.

In “The Hunt for Dark Matter” you can follow this process yourself, interactively. You get a real intuition for how gravitational lensing works and what its effects look like in the sky, without needing your own powerful telescope, or needing to work through the mathematics.

Once trained, you can test this intuition. In a minesweeper-like puzzle game, many clumps of invisible dark matter have been hidden in a toy universe. Can you spot the characteristic patterns of gravitational lensing? Will you succeed in the hunt for dark matter?

The Hunt for Dark Matter was conceived of by Shaun Hotchkiss and produced by Shaun in collaboration with DOTDOT.

Funding and scientific consultation were provided by Antony Lewis, Pierre Fleury and Catherine Heymans through research grants from the European Research Council and la Caixa Foundation.