Speakers
Andreea Font
Ian McCarthy
Description
In this session we will run a series of exercises aimed at familiarizing the attendees with large, publicly-available data sets derived from both cosmological simulations ("virtual universes") and astrophysical observations from two of ESA's most recent satellite missions: Gaia and Planck. We will show how the data sets can be retrieved in an efficient way and analysed using a variety of publicly-available software tools (e.g., visualisation software). In the case of Gaia, we will show how simple yet informative comparisons can be made with state-of-the-art simulations. For Planck, we will introduce methods for cosmological parameter inference, including MCMC samplers.
