The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: observational systematics and baryon acoustic oscillations in the correlation function

By A. Ross, F. Beutler, C. Chuang, M. Pellejero-Ibáñez, H. Seo, M. Vargas-Magaña, A. Cuesta, Will J. Percival, A. Burden, Ariel G. Sánchez and 20 more. 2016

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We present baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) scale measurements determined from the clustering of 1.2 million massive galaxies with redshifts 0.2 < z < 0.75 distributed over 9300 deg(2), as quantified by their redshift-space correlation function. In order to facilitate these measurements, we define, describe, and motivate the selection function for galaxies in the final data release (DR12) of the SDSS III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). This includes the observational footprint, masks for image quality and Galactic extinction, and weights to account for density relationships intrinsic to the imaging and spectroscopic portions of the survey. We simulate the observed systematic trends in mock galaxy samples and demonstrate that they impart no bias on BAO scale measurements and have a minor impact on the recovered statistical uncertainty. We measure transverse and radial BAO distance measurements in 0.2 < z < 0.5, 0.5 < z < 0.75, and (overlapping) 0.4 < z < 0.6 redshift bins. In each redshift bin, we obtain a precision that is 2.7 per cent or better on the radial distance and 1.6 per cent or better on the transverse distance. The combination of the redshift bins represents 1.8 per cent precision on the radial distance and 1.1 per cent precision on the transverse distance. This paper is part of a set that analyses the final galaxy clustering data set from BOSS. The measurements and likelihoods presented here are combined with others in Alam et al. to produce the final cosmological constraints from BOSS.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0df1f63817809720e296f9281be487da82586e54

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Citations in the corpus

Lensing is Low: Cosmology, Galaxy Formation, or New Physics? (2016, background): “10 Inhomogeneity in the CMASS sample selection due to seeing and stellar density (Ross et al. 2012, 2017) may contribute to this variance and will be explored in future work.”
The clustering of the SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey DR14 quasar sample: First measurement of baryon acoustic oscillations between redshift 0.8 and 2.2 (2017, unknown): “As in Ross et al. (2012, 2017) and Laurent et al. (2017), we define the weights based on fits to linear relationships.”
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: tomographic BAO analysis of DR12 combined sample in Fourier space (2016, methodology): “…2011), has reached percent level BAO measurements at zeff = 0.32 and zeff = 0.57 (Anderson et al. 2014; Cuesta et al. 2016; Gil-Marı́n et al. 2016; Ross et al. 2017; Beutler et al. 2017) using the ‘low-redshift’ (LOWZ; 0.15 < z < 0.43) and ‘constant stellar mass’ samples (CMASS; 0.43 < z < 0.7)…”
The completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: BAO and RSD measurements from anisotropic clustering analysis of the quasar sample in configuration space between redshift 0.8 and 2.2 (2020, methodology): “We follow the same methodology as in Ross et al. (2017), which was itself based on Xu et al. (2013) and Anderson et al. (2014).”