This cartoon is part of the DES Y3 #Darkbites social media series. It was drawn to illustrate a paper about the method used to check for internal agreement between different parts of the DES data. It was led by Cyrille Doux (website) and Eric Baxter (website) and is titled, “Dark Energy Survey internal consistency tests of the joint cosmological probes analysis with posterior predictive distributions” (arXiv:2011.03410).

alt="Cartoon of puzzle pieces showing a plot of DES data."

The post’s associated text was:

DES combines many different observations to learn about physics. To make sure this combination makes sense, we check that different pieces of the data agree on what they are telling us about the properties of the Universe.

Here’s a link to the post. The twitter thread of the Y3 Darkbites posts begins here. The cartoons also being shared on the DES facebook and instagram pages.