CfunBASE

Cosmological Functions Library for Astronomical Databases

Overview

CfunBASE is a customizable C# cosmological functions library in the .NET framework. Its primary use is in CasJobs/SkyServer, where the functions are ported into a MS-SQL Server database hosting the SDSS science archive, and can be executed through simple T-SQL commands. This gives cloud-computing users the possibility of calculating cosmological distances, volumes and times as a function of redshift, as well as their respective inverse functions. Also included are basic data exploratory analysis tools, such as binning, N-Dimensional weighted histograms, cumulative distribution and quantile aggregate functions.

Future sky surveys will provide N > 109 spectrospic or photometric redshift measurements, for which CfunBASE migh be of great utility. Most of the functions in CfunBASE constitute the building blocks for more elaborated scripts and algorithms of importance in extragalactic astronomy and cosmology. Some advanced astronomical examples presented in these web primer include the T-SQL implementation and fast computation of luminosity functions, color-magnitude diagrams and the friends-of-friends galaxy cluster identification algorithm.

Refer to the draft explanatory paper CfunBASE.pdf for more details. This paper has been accepted for publication in the PASP journal.


Last update June 21, 2010 Manuchehr Taghizadeh-Popp version 5.5.5