iCosmo

A quick pointer to Initiative for Cosmology (iCosmo). The website brings together a bunch of useful calculations for physical cosmology — relatively simple quantities like the relationship between redshift and distance, and also more complicated ones like the power spectrum of density perturbations (which tells us the distribution of galaxies on the largest scales in the Universe) and quantities derived from that like the distortions in the shapes of galaxies due to gravitational lensing, when the path of light from galaxies is perturbed by intervening mass in the Universe. Combined with good documentation and tutorials (and downloadable source), it makes a good companion to sites such as LAMBDA‘s CMB toolbox, which provides similar services targeted specifically at Cosmic Microwave Background science. iCosmo looks like it will be useful for researchers in the field as well as students, so thanks and congratulations to its creators (I’d like to point directly at the page listing them, but that doesn’t seem to be possible… instead, there’s a discussion forum at CosmoCoffee.).