The Cosmic Concordance Project

The Astronomy Department is pleased to showcase the Cosmic Concordance Project (CCP) website this month. The CCP was created by researcher Greg Huey, Professor Ben Wandelt, and Illinois alumus Richard Cyburt to make cosmological parameter extraction accessible to the general scientific community. The CCP website allows the user to choose from a wide selection of observational data sets and theoretical constraints which are then used to determine the most likely ranges of selected cosmological parameters. This makes it easy for experimenters and theorists (and you!) to explore and interpret the current state of cosmological knowledgde based on the combination of Cosmic Microwave Background data and other cosmological datasets.

The figure above shows an example result of such an online exploration of what is known about the densities of dark matter (Ω_m) and dark energy (Ω_Λ) in our Universe. Points in the figure are colored (from red to blue) according to how well the parameter combination at that point agrees with the data. Try it out for yourself!

Although still a work in progress, the website is already highly useful. The CCP already incorporates datasets from the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe, the Supernovae Cosmology Project, the Hubble Space Telescope Key Project, and Big Bang Nucleosynthesis abundance observations -- and new datasets are always being added.