The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological analysis of the DR12 galaxy sample

By Shadab Alam, M. Ata, S. Bailey, F. Beutler, D. Bizyaev, J. Blazek, A. Bolton, J. Brownstein, A. Burden, C. Chuang and 63 more. 2016

2,632 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present cosmological results from the final galaxy clustering data set of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our combined galaxy sample comprises 1.2 million massive galaxies over an effective area of 9329 deg^2 and volume of 18.7 Gpc^3, divided into three partially overlapping redshift slices centred at effective redshifts 0.38, 0.51 and 0.61. We measure the angular diameter distance and Hubble parameter H from the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) method, in combination with a cosmic microwave background prior on the sound horizon scale, after applying reconstruction to reduce non-linear effects on the BAO feature. Using the anisotropic clustering of the pre-reconstruction density field, we measure the product D_MH from the Alcock–Paczynski (AP) effect and the growth of structure, quantified by fσ_8(z), from redshift-space distortions (RSD). We combine individual measurements presented in seven companion papers into a set of consensus values and likelihoods, obtaining constraints that are tighter and more robust than those from any one method; in particular, the AP measurement from sub-BAO scales sharpens constraints from post-reconstruction BAOs by breaking degeneracy between D_M and H. Combined with Planck 2016 cosmic microwave background measurements, our distance scale measurements simultaneously imply curvature Ω_K = 0.0003 ± 0.0026 and a dark energy equation-of-state parameter w = −1.01 ± 0.06, in strong affirmation of the spatially flat cold dark matter (CDM) model with a cosmological constant (ΛCDM). Our RSD measurements of fσ_8, at 6 per cent precision, are similarly consistent with this model. When combined with supernova Ia data, we find H_0 = 67.3 ± 1.0 km s^−1 Mpc^−1 even for our most general dark energy model, in tension with some direct measurements. Adding extra relativistic species as a degree of freedom loosens the constraint only slightly, to H_0 = 67.8 ± 1.2 km s^−1 Mpc^−1. Assuming flat ΛCDM, we find Ω_m = 0.310 ± 0.005 and H_0 = 67.6 ± 0.5 km s^−1 Mpc^−1, and we find a 95 per cent upper limit of 0.16 eV c^−2 on the neutrino mass sum.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3fb672df083579d86b92d5142ef215b75d6f6e70

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Citations in the corpus

A Simple Phenomenological Emergent Dark Energy Model can Resolve the Hubble Tension (2019, methodology): “(ii) BAOs: four lower redshift BAO data sets are used: 6-degree Field Galaxy Survey (6dFGS) (Beutler et al. 2011), the SDSS Data Release 7 Main Galaxy sample (MGS) (Ross et al. 2015), the BOSS DR12 galaxies (Alam et al. 2017a) and the eBOSS DR14 quasars (Zhao et al. 2018).”
Lensing is Low: Cosmology, Galaxy Formation, or New Physics? (2016, methodology): “If assembly bias is at play, this could have implications for the growth of structure constraints from RSDs (Alam et al. 2017, and references therein).”
First Cosmology Results using Type Ia Supernovae from the Dark Energy Survey: Constraints on Cosmological Parameters (2018, methodology): “…constant (H0) by applying these DES-SN3YR results to the inverse-distance-ladder method anchored to the standard ruler measured by baryon acoustic oscillations (Alam et al. 2017; Carter et al. 2018, BAO), and related to the sound horizon measured with CMB data (Planck Collaboration et al. 2016).”
Dark Energy Survey Year 1 Results: A Precise H0 Estimate from DES Y1, BAO, and D/H Data (2017, methodology): “…DM(z = 0.51)rs,fid/rs = 1975 ± 30 Mpc Alam et al. (2017) DM(z = 0.61)rs,fid/rs = 2307 ± 37 Mpc Alam et al. (2017) H(z = 0.38)rs/rs,fid = 81.2 ± 2.4 km/s/Mpc Alam et al. (2017) H(z = 0.51)rs/rs,fid = 90.9 ± 2.4 km/s/Mpc Alam et al. (2017) H(z = 0.61)rs/rs,fid = 99.0 ± 2.5 km/s/Mpc Alam et al.…”
Probing the theory of gravity with gravitational lensing of gravitational waves and galaxy surveys (2019, methodology): “The Lambda-Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) model of cosmology matches well all of the best available data sets probing cosmic microwave background (CMB), galaxy distributions, and supernovae (Aghanim et al. 2018; Alam et al. 2017b; Abbott et al. 2018, 2019; Jones et al. 2018).”
H0LiCOW – XIII. A 2.4 per cent measurement of H0 from lensed quasars: 5.3σ tension between early- and late-Universe probes (2019, methodology): “…Planck (Planck Collaboration VI 2018b), sometimes including CMB weak lensing (CMBL) results, using the chains provided by the Planck team.4 We can also further combine with baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) constraints at various redshifts (Beutler et al. 2011; Ross et al. 2015; Alam et al. 2017).”
The evidence for a spatially flat Universe (2020, methodology): “…in Planck Collaboration et al. (2018b); ‘Pantheon’ denotes use of the Pantheon Type Ia supernovae sample of (Scolnic et al. 2015); ‘BAO’ denotes use of the baryonic acoustic oscillation measurements from Beutler et al. (2011); Ross et al. (2015); Alam et al. (2017) as discussed in PCP18 and EG.”