This page contains background and public outreach material about the
weak gravitational lensing analysis of the Hubble Space Telescope COSMOS survey. COSMOS
is the largest ever survey with HST, probing the growth of large-scale
structure in the universe over cosmic time. The exquisite imaging obtained
from space reveals the precise shapes of over half a million distant
galaxies. Via the effect of gravitational lensing, these can be used to
trace the distribution of otherwise invisible dark matter.
Raw data products
Images direct from the Hubble Space Telescope (and others) are freely available
from the COSMOS archive.
The projected 2D dark matter map and
three 2½D slices are
available in .fits image format, an standard in the astronomical community that
includes information on the absolute positioning of the image on the sky.
The 3D isodensity surface is
available in .3ds, .obj and .c4d formats.
However, that's only one isosurface. If you really want to start from scratch, the original
3D voxellated data (a voxel is a 3D pixel) is available
as 32 slices of .tiff images or stacked into a data cube in Interactive Data Language
(IDL) binary format, plus an IDL routine to plot it.
Thanks to Julien Lesgourgues, a weak lensing module is available for CosmoMC. It contains
the statistical "3D power spectrum" data of the mass distribution, originally published in the Astrophysical Journal.