or Dedicate Their Computers to It

In the burgeoning world of “doing science at home on your computer” made popular by such projects as Seti@Home, there’s a new entry: Cosmology@Home. It works the same as Seti and the other distributed computing projects: you download a program that goes to work on your computer chewing up chunks of data that will help astronomers come up with a model that best describes our universe. The ultimate goal is to find the range of models that best agree with the observational data from astronomy and particle physics experiments.

As described in the Welcome Letter on the project’s web page, each work package your computer processes helps simulate a universe with a particular geometry, particle content, and “physics of the beginning.” The cosmologists then take the chewed-on data and compare it to the fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background (observed from space by the WMAP and soon the Planck spacecraft, as well as from ground based and balloon based experiments), the large-scale distribution of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, measurements of the current expansion speed of the Universe by the Hubble space telescope, the acceleration of the Universe as measured by observations of supernova explosions, observations of primordial element abundances in distant gas clumps, and gravitational lensing data, when it becomes available.

If you’d like to take part in this large-scale computing project, check out the web link above for details on how to download the client and get started helping cosmologists explain the physical evolution of the universe we live in.