On April 27, artists, scientists, engineers, and dilettantes convened on the Yale Heart for Collaborative Arts and Media (CCAM) to take part within the 2024 Visualize Science contest. This was the third iteration of the Visualize Science contest hosted by Wright Lab. This 12 months’s contest was additionally co-sponsored by CCAM, Eric Fleischmann, and the Yale Quantum Institute.
The target of the half-day-long competitors was for groups of artists and scientists to work collectively to create a conceptual mannequin of a scientific idea, and understand it in both two- or three-dimensional format utilizing supplies offered for the competitors.
The idea chosen for this 12 months’s competitors was darkish matter, which is is likely one of the biggest mysteries in modern astrophysical analysis and a topic explored by a number of analysis teams at Wright Lab. By matching idea with observations, scientists imagine that roughly 80% of the matter within the Universe consists of darkish matter; but researchers have been unable to immediately detect darkish matter and the character of this substance is unknown.
Wright Lab DOE Trainee Celín Hidalgo ran the occasion, which started with a dialog with Sabrina Zacarias, a Wright Lab postdoctoral affiliate who develops detector applied sciences for darkish matter experiments, concerning the nature of darkish matter and the way it may be visualized whether it is each invisible and unknown.
The groups then break up into two teams, calling themselves the “Darkish Lords” and the “Sith Lords”, to work with artwork supplies offered and create fashions of darkish matter.
Each groups selected to reveal observations that scientists have made from phenomena that recommend the existence of darkish matter.
The Darkish Lords, who have been awarded the Choose’s award, made an allegorical mannequin of lensing, with a snail attempting to see a galaxy that’s blocked by darkish matter (represented by the “cosmic” turtle), so it as a substitute sees a distorted galaxy in a distinct place (pictured on the left, under).
In keeping with Wright Lab graduate scholar and Visualize Science participant Claire Laffan, The Sith Lords, who have been awarded the Individuals’s Award, made a mannequin (pictured on the proper, under) of the galaxy rotation downside found within the latter half of the twentieth century by astronomer Vera Rubin, which Rubin claimed was plain proof of darkish matter. The Sith Lords additionally selected to make a 3D animation of their sculpture.
Laffan additional defined, “The muse of the construction—the purple/blue disk—represents the darkish matter halo in and across the galaxy. The black sphere within the center represents the supermassive black gap on the heart of the galaxy, about which baryonic matter and darkish matter rotate. The spiral arms of the galaxy (pipe cleaners) comprise massive buildings of baryonic matter resembling photo voltaic methods (yellow and pink clay). The small blobs of purple clay representing darkish matter have been added in growing quantities as we made the animation. The extra darkish matter there’s, the sooner the galaxy rotates.”
Extra photos of the occasion and the animations will be discovered on our Flickr Album, linked under.
