This cartoon is part of the DES Y3 #Darkbites social media series. It was drawn to illustrate one of the Dark Energy Survey’s Year 3 key cosmology results paper titled “Dark Energy Survey Year 3 Results: Constraints on extensions to ΛCDM with weak lensing and galaxy clustering.” The paper describes an analysis that I co-led with Agnès Ferté, which uses DES Y3 galaxy clustering and weak lensing measurements to constrain several extensions to the standard cosmological model. (arXiv:2207.05766).

alt="Cartoon of a greek urn featuring a warrior fighting a hydra. The warrior's shield is labeled Lambda-CDM and each of the hydra's heads are labeled with parameters of model extensions we tested in the paper."

The post’s associated text was:

We tested how well new physics models related to the properties of dark energy, dark matter, the Universe’s geometry, or gravity fit the DES galaxy clustering and weak lensing data. This time, the simplest model ΛCDM won the fight, as no other model achieved a better fit.

Will ΛCDM again prevail in our final, year-6 analysis? We’ll have to wait and see.

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.