THE SDSS-IV EXTENDED BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY: OVERVIEW AND EARLY DATA

By K. Dawson, Jean-Paul Kneib, Will J. Percival, Shadab Alam, F. D. Albareti, S. Anderson, Eric Armengaud, E. Aubourg, S. Bailey, Julián Bautista and 136 more. 2015

659 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In a six-year program started in 2014 July, the Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS) will conduct novel cosmological observations using the BOSS spectrograph at Apache Point Observatory. These observations will be conducted simultaneously with the Time Domain Spectroscopic Survey (TDSS) designed for variability studies and the Spectroscopic Identification of eROSITA Sources (SPIDERS) program designed for studies of X-ray sources. In particular, eBOSS will measure with percent-level precision the distance-redshift relation with baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter. eBOSS will use four different tracers of the underlying matter density field to vastly expand the volume covered by BOSS and map the large-scale-structures over the relatively unconstrained redshift range 0.6 < z < 2.2. Using more than 250,000 new, spectroscopically confirmed luminous red galaxies at a median redshift z = 0.72, we project that eBOSS will yield measurements of the angular diameter distance dA(z) to an accuracy of 1.2% and measurements of H(z) to 2.1% when combined with the z > 0.6 sample of BOSS galaxies. With ∼195,000 new emission line galaxy redshifts, we expect BAO measurements of dA(z) to an accuracy of 3.1% and H(z) to 4.7% at an effective redshift of z = 0.87. A sample of more than 500,000 spectroscopically confirmed quasars will provide the first BAO distance measurements over the redshift range 0.9 < z < 2.2, with expected precision of 2.8% and 4.2% on dA(z) and H(z), respectively. Finally, with 60,000 new quasars and re-observation of 60,000 BOSS quasars, we will obtain new Lyα forest measurements at redshifts z > 2.1; these new data will enhance the precision of dA(z) and H(z) at z > 2.1 by a factor of 1.44 relative to BOSS. Furthermore, eBOSS will provide improved tests of General Relativity on cosmological scales through redshift-space distortion measurements, improved tests for non-Gaussianity in the primordial density field, and new constraints on the summed mass of all neutrino species. Here, we provide an overview of the cosmological goals, spectroscopic target sample, demonstration of spectral quality from early data, and projected cosmological constraints from eBOSS.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

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Citations in the corpus

Validation of the Scientific Program for the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (2023, methodology): “The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS; Dawson et al. 2013) of SDSS-III (Eisen-stein et al. 2011) and the extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS; Dawson et al. 2016) of SDSS-IV (Blanton et al. 2017) are the largest of those completed spectroscopic programs.”
Baryon acoustic oscillations from the cross-correlation of Lyα absorption and quasars in eBOSS DR14 (2019, methodology): “Starting in SDSS-IV, most of the objects are securely classified by the pipeline, with less than 10% of the spectra requiring visual inspection (Dawson et al. 2016).”
Project Overview of the Beijing–Arizona Sky Survey (2017, methodology): “SDSS-IV/eBOSS (2014-2020) will add another 0.6 million galaxies at 0.6 < z < 1 and 0.75 million quasars at z > 0.9 (Dawson et al. 2016).”
Robust forecasts on fundamental physics from the foreground-obscured, gravitationally-lensed CMB polarization (2015, positive): “J C A P 0 3 ( 2 0 1 6 ) 0 5 2 constraints are derived from CMB (and CIB) information alone: combination with data from galaxy surveys such as eBOSS [97] or DESI [98] will yield even greated discriminatory power [99, 100].”
Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Cosmological implications from two decades of spectroscopic surveys at the Apache Point Observatory (2020, background): “The extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS; Dawson et al. 2016)1 is the cosmological survey within SDSSIV (Blanton et al. 2017).”
A systematic search for changing-look quasars in SDSS (2015, methodology): “SEQUELS is the Sloan Extended QUasar, ELG and LRG Survey, undertaken as part of SDSS-III in order to prepare and refine target selection for the SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS; Dawson et al. 2015).”
Baryon acoustic oscillations at z = 2.34 from the correlations of Lyα absorption in eBOSS DR14 (2019, methodology): “The extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS; Dawson et al. 2016) is the extension of the BOSS experiment (Dawson et al. 2013) which aims to measure cosmology with 2 Available at https://github.com/igmhub/picca.”