Bang! Chi è stato? - ERNEST Project

The Story

The Narrative

Bang! Chi è stato? is a scientific escape room that brings the participants to the world of Gamma-ray astronomy, one of the new frontiers of modern astrophysics. Gamma rays are invisible to the human eye and telling how scientists catch this invisible and dramatically energetic radiation is a real challenge. Taking part in this mystery investigation, participants will meet the two ground-based observatories – the ASTRI Mini Array and the Cherenkov Telescope Array Observatory – that in the next few years will set a new benchmark in this field, as well as their science and the brilliant strategy they use to see the invisible. An unexpected signal from space was recorded by an X-ray satellite. Something violent happened, maybe an explosion. But we do not have enough information to get the whole picture, yet, not on the real nature of the emission, nor about its incoming direction. The Astronomer’s Telegram announcing the event, however, suggested what to do next: more observations, covering different electromagnetic bands. That’s where the real investigation starts! Will you be able to find out who fired the shot in the sky?

Inside the Experience

The core elements of the experience.

01

Your Role

Open your Astronomer’s Telegram and read it carefully. Something happened in the sky that is worth investigating, but where exactly? This is the first challenge: look at the sky around you and find your target. This will allow you to identify your Cherenkov telescope: open it and collect the gamma-ray data. And then the data must be analyzed: the next two puzzles give you the key to discovering the sky source of your interest and its peculiarities. Finally, as in every scientific research, results are to be shared with the community, that is the only way to make science advance. So, with the last step -writing a paper- your discovery can finally reach the world.

02

Scientific Focus

Our knowledge of astronomical objects and events relies almost entirely on the observation of the light they emit. Every band of the electromagnetic spectrum gives its contribution to the overall picture, and the best knowledge of the nature of any sky objects comes from combining these pieces together. Gamma rays from space track the most energetic phenomena in the Universe, going from supernovae explosion to extreme accreting system. Unlike visible light, they cannot penetrate the atmosphere, where they soon get absorbed, and their flux (at least at the higher energies) is too low to be observable with instruments onboard satellites outside the atmosphere (as we do, for example, with X-rays). The solution, however, is in the problem itself: when entering the atmosphere, high-energy gamma-rays produce a cascade of ultra-fast charged particles, that polarize other particles along their trajectory. The result is a faint flash of blue light, the Cherenkov light, that can be observed with ground-based telescopes.

03

Distinctive Features

Gamma-ray astronomy with Cherenkov telescopes is a very peculiar way of studying the sky, since it uses the atmosphere as the detector, and looks only indirectly at the sources we are interested in. This escape room shows how it works, giving the players the role of a science team, and having them follow all the steps of real scientific research, from asking the right questions, to data collection and analysis, all the way to the final publication of a paper.

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