Games

Two of my papers, made playable · real data, in a browser, free

Both of these are the actual research rather than an illustration of it: the same images, the same line frequencies, the same scoring metric as the papers they come from. They need nothing but a browser — no account, no install, no tracking beyond a page count — and both work on a phone.

Sky Puzzle

The Sky Puzzle board: the whole sky with the Herschel survey fields marked, and a tray of ALMA cutouts of lensed galaxies waiting to be placed.

Short ALMA observations of 297 Herschel-selected sources resolve what the far-infrared surveys could only register as a single bright dot: Einstein rings, arcs and multiple images, each one a monster galaxy stretched around a foreground mass. Sky Puzzle hands them to you one at a time, magnified 1300× and badly stretched, and asks you to develop each one and put it back where the telescope found it.

The pieces are the real data: the brightness slider restretches the actual significance map rather than filtering a picture. Herschel's beam is far too coarse to tell the sources apart, so the board shows each unfound galaxy as a faint preview at its true spot — match the shape, drag the piece there, and it clicks into place. Fifty-four of them carry a note about what was actually found, with a link to the paper.

Listening for a Cosmic Chord

The title screen of Listening for a Cosmic Chord, with a redshifted wave you can stretch and hear.

The CO lines of a galaxy form a harmonic series, which means a galaxy is literally a chord — and its redshift is the key it is played in. Listening for a Cosmic Chord lets you find that key by ear: you tune until the predicted lines stop beating against the detected ones.

Nine chapters take you from one line and thirteen possible distances, through the degeneracies that make a wrong answer sound perfect, to the lines that aren't there — and finish by having you design the ALMA tuning yourself, scored live with the metric from Bakx & Dannerbauer (2022) on the real HerBS sample. Built with INFRAVIS. The sound is the science, so play it with headphones if you can; every cue is also written out, so it works muted.

Using either of these in a classroom, a planetarium or an outreach evening is more than fine — that is what they are for. If you do, tell me about it; I would like to know what worked.