The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Data Release 9 Spectroscopic Galaxy Sample

By Lauren Anderson, E. Aubourg, Stephen Bailey, D. Bizyaev, M. Blanton, S. Adam, Bolton, J. Brinkmann, J. Brownstein, A. Burden and 76 more. 2012

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We present measurements of galaxy clustering from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III). These use the Data Release 9 (DR9) CMASS sample, which contains 264,283 massive galaxies covering 3275 square degrees with an effective redshift z=0.57 and redshift range 0.43<z<0.7. Assuming a concordance Lambda-CDM cosmological model, this sample covers an effective volume of 2.2 Gpc^3, and represents the largest sample of the Universe ever surveyed at this density, n = 3 x 10^-4 h^-3 Mpc^3. We measure the angle-averaged galaxy correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of 5\sigma in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Combining with the SDSS-II Luminous Red Galaxy Sample, the detection significance increases to 6.7\sigma. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance to z=0.57 relative to the sound horizon DV /rs = 13.67 +/- 0.22 at z=0.57. Assuming a fiducial sound horizon of 153.19 Mpc, which matches cosmic microwave background constraints, this corresponds to a distance DV(z=0.57) = 2094 +/- 34 Mpc. At 1.7 per cent, this is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. We place this result alongside previous BAO measurements in a cosmological distance ladder and find excellent agreement with the current supernova measurements. We use these distance measurements to constrain various cosmological models, finding continuing support for a flat Universe with a cosmological constant.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Nuclear and High Energy Physics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5da35c1e00b409f8b6a0137d8c375961f60e8de5

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Citations in the corpus

The Atacama Cosmology Telescope: cosmological parameters from three seasons of data (2013, methodology): “The solid curves are for ACT plus WMAP7, and the dashed lines add priors from measurements of the baryon acoustic peak [6, 20, 142] and a direct measurement of H0 [153].”
A buyer’s guide to the Hubble constant (2021, unknown): “BOSS has spectroscopically surveyed 1.5 million luminous galaxies over 10,000 deg2 between 0.2 z 0.7, with angular separations greater than 62′′ (which is 0.5 Mpc at z ∼ 0.7).”