The gamma-game!

Playing with Gamma Rays

I’ve put together a little game: The Gamma Game.

The idea is simple — look at images from the CTAO LST-1 telescope and try to guess whether they came from a gamma ray or a proton. That’s exactly what Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes (IACTs) have to do, but instead of humans, it’s usually machine learning models making the call.

It’s fun (and surprisingly tricky) to try to beat the AI. You quickly see why gamma–hadron separation is such a core challenge: the showers look messy, noisy, and sometimes almost identical. In real life, telescopes like those of the Cherenkov Telescope Array combine multiple views and advanced algorithms to reconstruct the direction, energy, and identity of each event.

The game is a playful way to peek into that process. It shows the step where we try to separate signal from overwhelming background — a small but crucial part of turning faint flashes of Cherenkov light into discoveries about the high-energy universe.