Analysis of Systematic Effects and Statistical Uncertainties in Angular Clustering of Galaxies from Early Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data

By R. Scranton, D. Johnston, Scott Dodelson, Joshua A. Frieman, Andrew J. Connolly, Daniel J. Eisenstein, James E. Gunn, L. Hui, B. Jain, S. Kent and 36 more. 2001

210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The angular distribution of galaxies encodes a wealth of information about large-scale structure. Ultimately, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) will record the angular positions of order of 108 galaxies in five bands, adding significantly to the cosmological constraints. This is the first in a series of papers analyzing a rectangular stripe of 2.°5 × 90° from early SDSS data. We present the angular correlation function for galaxies in four separate magnitude bins on angular scales ranging from 0.°003 to 15°. Much of the focus of this paper is on potential systematic effects. We show that the final galaxy catalog—with the mask accounting for regions of poor seeing, reddening, bright stars, etc.—is free from external and internal systematic effects for galaxies brighter than r* = 22. Our estimator of the angular correlation function includes the effects of the integral constraint and the mask. The full covariance matrix of errors in these estimates is derived using mock catalogs with further estimates using a number of other methods.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4f862eae6b9b3cf5fa3f47f63f18e448478f6322

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Citations in the corpus

A UNIFIED CATALOG OF RADIO OBJECTS DETECTED BY NVSS, FIRST, WENSS, GB6, AND SDSS (2008, background): “The morphological information from SDSS images allows reliable star-galaxy separation to r ∼ 21.5 (Lupton et al. 2002; Scranton et al. 2002).”
Measuring the galaxy–mass and galaxy–dust correlations through magnification and reddening (2009, methodology): “With these cuts, we can reliably perform star/galaxy separation using Bayesian methods to i = 21 (Scranton et al. 2002), yielding a galaxy sample whose density is independent of local variations in seeing, Galactic extinction, sky brightness or stellar density after masking.”
Sloan Digital Sky Survey Standard Star Catalog for Stripe 82: The Dawn of Industrial 1% Optical Photometry (2007, background): “…number of galaxies.20Astrometric positions are accurate to better than 0.100 per coordinate (rms) for sources with r < 20:5 mag (Pier et al. 2003), and the morphological informa- tion from the images allows reliable star-galaxy separation to r 21:5 mag (Lupton et al. 2002; Scranton et al. 2002).”
Detection of Cosmic Magnification with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (2005, methodology): “To limit our contamination from systematic errors (Scranton et al. 2002) in the photometric data, we imposed a seeing limit of 1.”
NEWLY QUENCHED GALAXIES AS THE CAUSE FOR THE APPARENT EVOLUTION IN AVERAGE SIZE OF THE POPULATION (2013, background): “This is risky, as the input photometric catalogs may have missed compact galaxies through an imperfect statistical star-galaxy separation (Scranton et al. 2002).”
EFFICIENT PHOTOMETRIC SELECTION OF QUASARS FROM THE SLOAN DIGITAL SKY SURVEY. II. ∼1, 000, 000 QUASARS FROM DATA RELEASE 6 (2004, methodology): “Furthermore, we intend to use a Bayesian star/galaxy classification algorithm (Scranton et al. 2002) for future catalogs in order to reduce the fraction of objects that have misclassified morphologies.”
Clustering Analyses of 300,000 Photometrically Classified Quasars. I. Luminosity and Redshift Evolution in Quasar Bias (2006, methodology): “We estimate errors and covariance matrices using inverse-variance-weighted jackknife resampling (Scranton et al. 2002; Zehavi et al. 2002; Myers et al. 2005).”
Clustering of intermediate redshift quasars using the final SDSS III-BOSS sample (2015, methodology): “We estimate the uncertainties using inverse-variance-weight d jackknife resampling (Scranton et al. 2002; Zehavi et al. 2002; Myers et al. 2005).”
Systematic errors in weak lensing: application to SDSS galaxy-galaxy weak lensing (2005, methodology): “While there are probabilistic methods that are more accurate at the faint end (r > 21), such as that used in Scranton et al. (2002) and Sheldon et al. (2004), OBJC TYPE’s conservative tendency should not cause significant stellar contamination, though it does reduce the density of sources in poor…”
Measurement of Galaxy Cluster Sizes, Radial Profiles, and Luminosity Functions from SDSS Photometric Data (2004, methodology): “Star-galaxy separation is robust to 21.0, 21.0, 21.0, and 19.8 in g, r, i, and z passbands respectively (Scranton et al. 2002), which we adopt as the limiting apparent magnitudes for this work.”