The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: survey design and first data release

By Michael Drinkwater, R. Jurek, C. Blake, D. Woods, Kevin A. Pimbblet, Karl Glazebrook, R. Sharp, M. Pracy, S. Brough, M. Colless and 17 more. 2009

414 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey is a survey of 240 000 emission-line galaxies in the distant Universe, measured with the AAOmega spectrograph on the 3.9-m Anglo-Australian Telescope (AAT). The primary aim of the survey is to precisely measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) imprinted on the spatial distribution of these galaxies at look-back times of 4–8 Gyr. The target galaxies are selected using ultraviolet (UV) photometry from the Galaxy Evolution Explorer satellite, with a flux limit of NUV < 22.8 mag . We also require that the targets are detected at optical wavelengths, specifically in the range 20.0 < r < 22.5 mag . We use the Lyman break method applied to the UV colours, with additional optical colour limits, to select high-redshift galaxies. The galaxies generally have strong emission lines, permitting reliable redshift measurements in relatively short exposure times on the AAT. The median redshift of the galaxies is z_(med)= 0.6 . The redshift range containing 90 per cent of the galaxies is 0.2 < z < 1.0 . The survey will sample a volume of ~1 Gpc^3 over a projected area on the sky of 1000 deg^2, with an average target density of 350 deg^(−2). Detailed forecasts indicate that the survey will measure the BAO scale to better than 2 per cent and the tangential and radial acoustic wave scales to approximately 3 and 5 per cent, respectively. Combining the WiggleZ constraints with existing cosmic microwave background measurements and the latest supernova data, the marginalized uncertainties in the cosmological model are expected to be σ(Ω_m) = 0.02 and σ(w) = 0.07 (for a constant w model). The WiggleZ measurement of w will constitute a robust, precise and independent test of dark energy models. This paper provides a detailed description of the survey and its design, as well as the spectroscopic observations, data reduction and redshift measurement techniques employed. It also presents an analysis of the properties of the target galaxies, including emission-line diagnostics which show that they are mostly extreme starburst galaxies, and Hubble Space Telescope images, which show that they contain a high fraction of interacting or distorted systems. In conjunction with this paper, we make a public data release of data for the first 100 000 galaxies measured for the project.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Instrumentation

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Citations in the corpus

The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: mapping the distance-redshift relation with baryon acoustic oscillations (2011, methodology): “ar X iv :1 We present measurements of the baryon acoustic peak at redshifts z = 0.44, 0.6 and 0.73 in the galaxy correlation function of the final dataset of the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey.”
The clustering of galaxies in the sdss-iii baryon oscillation spectroscopic survey: Baryon acoustic oscillations in the data release 9 spectroscopic galaxy sample (2012, methodology): “Adding to these data, Blake et al. (2011a) measured the BAO feature at z = 0.6, using the WiggleZ survey (Drinkwater et al 2010), making a 4 per cent distance measurement from 132 509 galaxies.”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: measurements of the growth of structure and expansion rate at z = 0.57 from anisotropic clustering (2012, methodology): “Recently, the WiggleZ survey (Drinkwater et al. 2010) has performed a joint RSD and AP analysis that constrains the expansion history in four bins across 0.1 < z < 0.9 at the 10–15 per cent level (Blake et al. 2011c).”
The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: testing the cosmological model with baryon acoustic oscillations at z= 0.6 (2011, methodology): “The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey at the Australian Astronomical Observatory (Drinkwater et al. 2010) was designed to provide the next-generation spectroscopic BAO dataset following the SDSS, extending the distance-scale measurements across the intermediate-redshift range up to z = 0.9 with a…”
The SDSS-IV Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations at Redshift of 0.72 with the DR14 Luminous Red Galaxy Sample (2017, methodology): “These spectroscopic programs were followed by the WiggleZ survey at higher redshift (Drinkwater et al. 2010) and the 6-degree Field Galaxy Survey (6dFGS; Jones et al. 2009) at lower redshift, also measuring BAO (Beutler et al. 2011; Blake et al. 2011, respectively).”
THE SDSS-IV EXTENDED BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY: OVERVIEW AND EARLY DATA (2015, result): “…will produce the largest sample of z > 0.6 LRGs to date, a high-redshift ELG sample exceeding that of the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey (Drinkwater et al. 2010; Blake et al. 2011a), a sample of quasars exceeding that of all previous observations combined, and an enhanced sample of Lyα…”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey:a large sample of mock galaxy catalogues (2012, background): “…as the the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS, Schlegel et al. 2009a; Eisenstein et al. ? email:marc.manera@port.ac.uk 2011), WiggleZ (Drinkwater et al. 2010), HETDEX Hill et al. (2004), and the Dark Energy Survey †, designed to cover large areas of the sky, are currently leading the…”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: single-probe measurements and the strong power of f(z)σ8(z) on constraining dark energy (2013, background): “5 < z < 1 over 1000 square degrees (Drinkwater et al. 2010; Parkinsonet al. 2012), and the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS, Dawson et al. 2013) of the SDSS-III (Eisenstein et al. 2011) is surveying 1.5 million luminous red galaxies (LRGs) at0.”
Galaxy Alignments: Observations and Impact on Cosmology (2015, methodology): “Such a sample was provided by the overlap of the SDSS imaging and the WiggleZ redshift survey (Drinkwater et al. 2010), which targeted a population of blue galaxies, whose mean redshift was zmean ∼ 0.6, with a primary science goal of measuring Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO).”
Target Selection and Validation of DESI Emission Line Galaxies (2022, background): “For instance, the VVDS and DEEP2 observations covered a few square degrees, while the WiggleZ (Drinkwater et al. 2010) and eBOSS/ELG (Raichoor et al. 2017, 2021) surveys observed about 1000 square degrees, but their ELG samples were more than one magnitude brighter, had a lower density by five to…”
CFHTLenS: testing the laws of gravity with tomographic weak lensing and redshift-space distortions (2012, methodology): “The WiggleZ Survey (Drinkwater et al. 2010) at the 3.9- m Anglo-Australian Telescope has mapped a cosmic volume ∼1 Gpc3 over the redshift range 0 < z < 1.”
The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: measuring the cosmic expansion history using the Alcock-Paczynski test and distant supernovae (2011, methodology): “The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey (Drinkwater et al. 2010) at the 3.9-m Anglo-Australian Telescope has provided the next step in large-scale spectroscopic galaxy redshift surveys, mapping a cosmic volume ∼ 1 Gpc3 over the redshift range 0 < z < 1.”
Galaxy Alignments: An Overview (2015, methodology): “Examples of such surveys include the WiggleZ survey (Drinkwater et al. 2010), which was used by Mandelbaum et al.”
The DESI Experiment Part I: Science,Targeting, and Survey Design (2016, methodology): “At still lower redshifts, the 6-Degree Field Galaxy Redshift Survey [8] measured the distance to z = 0.106 with 4.5% accuracy At a somewhat higher redshift, the WiggleZ galaxy survey measured the distance to a redshift of 0.7 to 4% [9].”
THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY COADD: 275 deg2 OF DEEP SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY IMAGING ON STRIPE 82 (2011, methodology): “…used the Canadian Network for Observational Cosmology Field Galaxy Survey (Yee et al. 2000), the Deep Extragalactic Evolutionary Probe (DEEP2; Weiner et al. 2005), the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey (Drinkwater et al. 2010), and the Visible imaging MultiObject Spectrograph VVDS (Le Fèvre et al. 2005).”
THE BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY OF SDSS-III (2012, methodology): “The recently completed WiggleZ survey (Drinkwater et al. 2010) observed 200,000 emission-line galaxies over 800 deg2, obtaining the first BAO measurements at 0.5 < z < 1.0, with an aggregate distance precision of 3.8% at a central redshift z = 0.6 (Blake et al. 2011b).”
Second data release of the Hyper Suprime-Cam Subaru Strategic Program (2019, neutral): “The list includes redshifts from zCOSMOS DR3 (Lilly et al. 2009), UDSz (Bradshaw et al. 2013; McLure et al. 2013), 3DHST (Skelton et al. 2014; Momcheva et al. 2016), FMOSCOSMOS (Silverman et al. 2015; Kashino et al. 2019), VVDS (Le Fèvre et al. 2013), VIPERS PDR1 (Garilli et al. 2014), SDSS DR12 (A”
THE COYOTE UNIVERSE EXTENDED: PRECISION EMULATION OF THE MATTER POWER SPECTRUM (2013, methodology): “…focusing on the measurement of BAO and galaxy clustering include the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS; Zehavi et al. 2011), the WiggleZ survey (Drinkwater et al. 2010) and the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS; Schlegel et al. 2009) component of SDSS-III; planned next-generation…”