This Perl module provides physical constants useful for astronomy and physics in the MKS and CGS systems.
Tired of your programs producing garbage because you mis-typed the gravitational constant or assigned a value instead of checking equality? Why not rely on a module that does all that work for you and gives you all the constants ready to use with a simple
use Astro::Constants qw( :cosmology );
instead of relying on Magic Numbers which only serve to obscure your intent from everyone, including yourself six months from now. C'mon now, make your programs readable!
Make your programs faster!!!
The benchmarks show that all of the long name constants are at least 3 times faster in calculations than using variables, short names or other constant modules to hold the values.
While no-one can give bomb-proof guarantees that these values are correct (indeed, some of them are liable to change in time), rest assured that these values will be checked against standards bodies and the relevant references and urls provided for you to decide how much you want to trust the values in this module.
Check the ChangeLog for changes in any variables.
This module started out as a Perl port of Jeremy Bailin's Astroconst package. The url http://astroconst.org used to house this project. It's now been abandoned.
Looking for speed in your script? Consider upgrading your perl to v5.23.4 which has a 40% improvement over v5.20.3 and newer perls are even faster!