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.

Multimedia stuff

Related/inspired artwork

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.

Front cover of Nature magazine, 18th Jan 2007

Stereo image of the 3D mass map

Embedded galaxies are just for fun - NOT REAL DATA!

CNC sculpture by Vincent Tiley

Mobile by architect Dieter Janssen

Trembling Field by Karel Nel. Photo by Thomas Bschorr.

Last updated by Richard Massey on 23rd February 2016.

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