Related papers: Cosmography and Data Visualization
Projected in the sky, galaxies are spatially-resolved objects. To understand how they formed and evolve it is necessary to study the spatial distribution of their observables. In this review talk, we briefly describe some scaling relations…
Large, high-resolution space-based imaging surveys produce a volume of data that is difficult to present to the public in a comprehensible way. While megapixel-sized images can still be printed out or downloaded via the World Wide Web, this…
Galaxy-scale strong lensing is a powerful tool in Astrophysics and Cosmology, enabling studies of massive galaxies' internal structure, their formation and evolution, stellar initial mass function, and cosmological parameters. In this…
I discuss some aspects of the use of computers in Relativity, Astrophysics and Cosmology. For each section I provide two examples representative of the field, including gravitational collapse, black hole imagery, supernovae explosions,…
Cartograms are maps in which areas of geographic regions (countries, states) appear in proportion to some variable of interest (population, income). Cartograms are popular visualizations for geo-referenced data that have been around for…
Weak gravitational lensing is a unique probe of the dark side of the universe: it provides a direct way to map the distribution of dark matter around galaxies, clusters of galaxies and on cosmological scales. Furthermore, the measurement of…
Large volume cosmological simulations succeed in reproducing the large-scale structure of the Universe. However, they lack resolution and may not take into account all relevant physical processes to test if the detail properties of galaxies…
We perform a cosmographic analysis using several cosmological observables such as the luminosity distance moduli, the volume distance, the angular diameter distance and the Hubble parameter. These quantities are determined using different…
Cosmic structure simulations have improved enormously over the past decade, both in terms of the resolution which can be achieved, and with the addition of hydrodynamic and other techniques to formerly purely gravitational methods. This is…
We note that in general there exist two basic aspects in any branch of physics, including cosmology - one dealing with the attributes of basic constituents and forces of nature, the other dealing with how structures arise from them and how…
Sky surveys represent a fundamental data basis for astronomy. We use them to map in a systematic way the universe and its constituents, and to discover new types of objects or phenomena. We review the subject, with an emphasis on the…
Cosmological simulations are a powerful tool to advance our understanding of galaxy formation and many simulations model key properties of real galaxies. A question that naturally arises for such simulations in light of high-quality…
Redshift surveys are a powerful tool of modern cosmology. We discuss two aspects of their power to map the distribution of mass and light in the universe: (1) measuring the mass distribution extending into the infall regions of rich…
Weak lensing by large scale structure or 'cosmic shear' is a potentially powerful cosmological probe to shed new light on Dark Matter, Dark Energy and Modified Gravity. It is based on the weak distortions induced by large-scale structures…
This chapter introduces OpenStreetMap - a crowd-sourced, worldwide mapping project and geospatial data repository - to illustrate its usefulness in quickly and easily analyzing and visualizing planning and design outcomes in the built…
The technique of intensity mapping (IM) has emerged as a powerful tool to explore the universe at $z < 6$. IM measures the integrated emission from sources over a broad range of frequencies, unlocking significantly more information than…
Interactive visualization of astronomical catalogs requires novel techniques due to the huge volumes and complex structure of the data produced by existing and upcoming astronomical surveys. The creation as well as the disclosure of the…
Since the late 1970's, redshift surveys have been vital for progress in understanding large-scale structure in the Universe. The original CfA redshift survey collected spectra of 20-30 galaxies per clear night on a 1.5 meter telescope; over…
Effective data visualization is a key part of the discovery process in the era of big data. It is the bridge between the quantitative content of the data and human intuition, and thus an essential component of the scientific path from data…
The paper discusses the problem of demarcation between the dimensions of natural and the human sciences in contemporary cosmology. In spite of a common presumption that cosmology is a natural science, the specificity of its alleged subject…