This cartoon is part of the DES Y3 #Darkbites social media series. It was designed in collaboraton with Alex Amon and drawn to illustrate a paper she led, which is one of two papers describing the DES Year 3 cosmic shear measurements. In particular, this paper focuses on the measurements that go into the analysis and the robustness of the cosmological results to observational uncertainties and systematics. The paper’s title is, “Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Cosmology from Cosmic Shear and Robustness to Data Calibration” (arXiv:2105.13543).

alt="Cartoon of whimsical factory equipment, with different pieces of machinery representing shear analysis steps."

The post’s associated text was:

Going from telescope images to catalogs of galaxy shapes and colors, to weak lensing measurements, to cosmology results is a complicated process. Along the way we do lots of tests to make sure our results are robust to uncertainties from each step of that analysis.

This paper presents results from cosmic shear analyses and details their robustness to observational uncertainties like redshift estimation and the blending of light from overlapping galaxies.

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.

Here’s a version of the illustration without the hashtag: alt="Cartoon of whimsical factory equipment, with different pieces of machinery representing shear analysis steps."