←
Sky Puzzle ALMA snapshots on the Herschel sky
0 / 0 placed
0 in a row
←
Brighten it until you can see the galaxy, then drag it onto the sky — or click where it belongs.
Loading the sky…
Stuck?
Each piece is a real ALMA image of a gravitationally lensed galaxy, blown up 1300× so you can see it — and it starts badly stretched, so slide it brighter until the ring or arc appears.
Every one of them sits on a source in the Herschel/SPIRE maps below — but Herschel's beam is far too coarse to tell them apart, so the board shows each unfound galaxy as a faint preview at its true spot. Match the shape and put the piece there — drag it, or pick it up with a click and click the spot — and it snaps home, corner brackets and all.
You start with the stand-outs: 86 curated pieces, the ones with a ring, an arc or multiple images worth looking at. The button in the Options menu (or the A key) swaps them for all 297 ALMA snapshots of the survey — the same puzzle at full length, most of the extra pieces faint blobs rather than showpieces. Whatever you have already placed stays placed when you switch.
Streak counts how many you place in a row: every piece that clicks home adds one, and any drop that does not lands you back at zero. Your best run is kept.
Some of these galaxies have been studied one by one, and placing one of those pops up a short note about what was found and a link to the paper. There are 80 of them hidden across the board. Tap a galaxy you have already placed to read its note again, or switch the notes off in Options (D).
Finishing a set scores it, arcade style: a hundred a piece, more for every note you turned up and for a long run, less for every wrong drop, and a bonus for whatever time you had left. Beat one of the ten scores on the board and the machine asks for three letters. That table is kept in this browser and nowhere else — Reset clears the sky, never the scores (S).
Coordinates draws the RA/Dec grid and puts each piece's sky position in its panel — the astronomer's way to find it. Positions just rings the spots that are still empty. Scroll or pinch to zoom; drag empty sky to pan.
The game opens on the whole sky: the six fields at their true right ascension and declination, over the Milky Way, the constellations and every star down to naked-eye magnitude 6. The fields hug the galactic poles because that is where the Galaxy's own dust is thinnest, and Fomalhaut sits inside the SGP field. That same button (or the V key) swaps it for the composite board — the six fields packed side by side, tighter on screen with no sky around them.
You have just rebuilt the ALMA snapshot survey on the Herschel sky — every piece back where the telescope found it.
Star, constellation and Milky Way data: d3-celestial (Hipparcos / Yale BSC), MIT licence. Everything else is Herschel/SPIRE and ALMA data.
Enter your initials