Why not spend Halloween looking for something truly ghostly and mysterious? Astronomers have created a new competition that asks the general public to generate algorithms that can help spot dark matter in Hubble images.

The contest, called Observing Dark Worlds, aims to capitalize on the ever-growing field of citizen science, where non-experts are asked to sift through data to help make discoveries. While most citizen science projects rely on people’s free time, this contest is looking to give out cash prizes, to the tune of $20,000.

Dark matter is thought to be a strange form of matter that doesn’t interact with electromagnetism and light. It is all-pervasive in the universe, accounting for roughly 85 percent of the matter in the cosmos. While astronomers can’t directly see dark matter, its effects can still be observed.

When a large amount of dark matter gathers in one place, such as the halo around a galaxy, it will exert a massive gravitational force. This field is so strong it can bend the path of light beams passing near it. Stars behind this dark-matter clump will appear distorted, their light stretched and warped like in a funhouse mirror reflection.

Astronomers have been able to infer the presence of many dark-matter agglomerations by looking for this distorted light, but they haven’t been able to find a technique that can unfailingly uncover dark matter in telescope images. This contest is looking to throw more brain power at this problem in order to solve it once and for all.

“We challenge YOU to detect the most elusive, mysterious and yet most abundant matter in all existence,” write the contest’s organizers on their website.

The organizers are looking for people with backgrounds in science, data engineering, and statistics, but anyone is free to try coming up with a good dark-matter search technique. People or groups whose code best predicts the center of 120 test dark-matter halos will receive the $20,000 in prize money, split three ways: First place will get $12,000, second will get $5,000 and third place will receive $3,000.

So far, 112 teams have signed up for Dark Worlds. The contest runs through Dec. 16.

Image: Dark matter in the Abel cluster distorts light from distant galaxies. NASA, N. Benitez (JHU), T. Broadhurst (Racah Institute of Physics/The Hebrew University), H. Ford (JHU), M. Clampin (STScI), G. Hartig (STScI), G. Illingworth (UCO/Lick Observatory), the ACS Science Team and ESA