The universe isn't behaving. Or at least, that's the view of many of the world's leading scientists: the universe behaves as if there is far more matter than we can observe. And that's important, because it means either that vital scientific theories are wrong, or that there are whole new types of stuff that we haven't yet discovered.
Mapping Dark Matter is a image analysis competition whose aim is to encourage the development of new algorithms that can be applied to challenge of measuring the tiny distortions in galaxy images caused by dark matter.
The aim is to measure the shapes of galaxies to reconstruct the gravitational lensing signal in the presence of noise and a known Point Spread Function. The signal is a very small change in the galaxies’ ellipticity, an exactly circular galaxy image would be changed into an ellipse; however real galaxies are not circular.
The challenge is to measure the ellipticity of 100,000 simulated galaxies.
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