ObservationalCosmology

Useful links

There are many good cosmology-related web sites. I list below some of the most useful that I have found. If you do your own search, remember that web pages are not peer reviewed, so you cannot count on them being correct. You may want to check the credentials of web authors (e.g. look in ADS  to see what they have published) to see if they are bona fide astrophysicists, or check whether the website is an academic one (e.g. ends in  .edu, .gov  or .ac.uk). Some excellent advice is available on how to best search the web and assess the contents of what you find, including practical examples.

If you find any other especially informative websites, please send me the URLs and I will add them to the list.

Introductory and general cosmology

• Cambridge Cosmology -The homepage of Stephen Hawking's group gives an excellent introductory overview of cosmology
• Ned Wright's cosmology tutorial - Goes well beyond the introductory level, and has a "News of the Universe" page for recent developments
• A cosmology timeline - From Joseph Tenn of Sonoma State University
• WMAP - US Microwave Anisotropy Probe homepage has a useful introductory cosmology section
• Patrick Leahy's cosmology site - A variety of useful tutorials, essays and links
• The Astronomy Cafe - Excellent and interesting Q&A pages at three levels of astronomical expertise
• Scientific American  - cosmology special edition (not free, unfortunately)
• BBC podcast on Galaxies - from In Our Time (requires MP3 player)

Observational cosmology

• Level 5 - A very useful hyperlinked index to many review papers and other resources, from the NASA Extragalactic Database team
• Atlas of the Universe - Images showing the appearance of the Universe zooming out from the sun
• Groups & clusters of galaxies - A web site giving details of nearby groups and clusters, including Virgo
• The multiwavelength Milky Way - Nice presentation of the appearance of our galaxy from radio to gamma ray, with explanations for each band
• Astronomical survey projects - Links to survey homepages compiled by AstroWeb
• Infrared astronomy - Results from a range of ground and space-based IR instruments

Specific projects

• Supernova Cosmology Project - Using high z supernovae to determine the geometry of the Universe
• WMAP - US Microwave Anisotropy Probe satellite (COBE follow-up)
• Hubble Space Telescope - Nice images with explanations. See also the Hubble Heritage Project.
• Dark Matter Searches - The possible candidates for Dark Matter, and how to search for "WIMPs", from the UK Dark Matter Collaboration
  
• Chandra X-ray Observatory- The latest from the major US X-ray observatory
• COBE - NASA's Cosmic Background Explorer

Cosmological theory

• Ned Wright's cosmology tutorial - Contains a useful introduction and some very nice diagrams
• Relativity primers - a variety of useful web pages on Special and General Relativity
• Relativity and black holes - from the US National Supercomputer Center, with simulations

Simulating the universe

• Galaxy-galaxy collisions - by Josh Barnes
• Collision of the Milky Way and M31 - Simulation of our future by John Dubinski
• The Virgo consortium - State-of-the art cosmological simulations
• The Hubble Volume project - Simulating a ~3Gpc cube!
• The Millennium simulation - A 10 billion particle dark matter simulation with galaxies added
• N-body simulations - from the University of Washington

Research publications

• ADS - Text and abstracts of published astrophysics papers (searchable) - now also incorporates links to astro-ph
• Astro-ph - Astronomy preprint server, very widely used (searchable