The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: analysis of potential systematics

By A. Ross, Will J. Percival, Ariel G. Sánchez, L. Samushia, Shirley Ho, E. Kazin, Marc Manera, B. Reid, M. White, R. Tojeiro and 31 more. 2012

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We analyse the density field of galaxies observed by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS)-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) included in the SDSS Data Release Nine (DR9). DR9 includes spectroscopic redshifts for over 400 000 galaxies spread over a footprint of 3275 deg2. We identify, characterize and mitigate the impact of sources of systematic uncertainty on large-scale clustering measurements, both for angular moments of the redshift-space correlation function, ξl(s), and the spherically averaged power spectrum, P(k), in order to ensure that robust cosmological constraints will be obtained from these data. A correlation between the projected density of stars and the higher redshift (0.43 120 h−1 Mpc or k < 0.01 h Mpc−1. We find that these errors can be ameliorated by weighting galaxies based on their surface brightness and the local stellar density. The clustering of CMASS galaxies found in the Northern and Southern Galactic footprints of the survey generally agrees to within 2σ. We use mock galaxy catalogues that simulate the CMASS selection function to determine that randomly selecting galaxy redshifts in order to simulate the radial selection function of a random sample imparts the least systematic error on ξl(s) measurements and that this systematic error is negligible for the spherically averaged correlation function, ξ0. We find a peak in ξ0 at s~ 200 h−1 Mpc, with a corresponding feature with period ~0.03 h Mpc−1 in P(k), and find features at least as strong in 4.8 per cent of the mock galaxy catalogues, concluding this feature is likely to be a consequence of cosmic variance. The methods we recommend for the calculation of clustering measurements using the CMASS sample are adopted in companion papers that locate the position of the baryon acoustic oscillation feature, constrain cosmological models using the full shape of ξ0 and measure the rate of structure growth.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics, Ecology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ed2c924b1a9dc13f0fe5a632927cd9937054facd

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Citations in the corpus

The clustering of the SDSS main galaxy sample – II. Mock galaxy catalogues and a measurement of the growth of structure from redshift space distortions at z = 0.15 (2014, background): “…can be calculated analytically from the properties of our survey, we include it as a free parameter to also account for additional uncertainties in the modelling of the monopole and potential observational systematic effects, which tend to add nearly scaleindependent clustering (Ross et al. 2012).”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey:a large sample of mock galaxy catalogues (2012, methodology): “The details of the catalogue and mask used for the large-scale structure analyses are explained in Anderson et al. (2012), and an analysis of potential systematic effects is presented in Ross et al. (2012).”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Measuring growth rate and geometry with anisotropic clustering (2013, background): “The second weight wsys = wstarwsee accounts for the systematic effects associated with both the varying stellar density (wstar; Ross et al. 2012) and seeing variations in the imaging catalogue used for targeting (wsee; Anderson et al. 2014).”
The SDSS-IV Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Baryon Acoustic Oscillations at Redshift of 0.72 with the DR14 Luminous Red Galaxy Sample (2017, unknown): “In BOSS clustering studies, it was found that galaxy density is correlated with stellar density and seeing (Ross et al. 2011, 2012, 2017; Ho et al. 2012).”
Clustering of intermediate redshift quasars using the final SDSS III-BOSS sample (2015, methodology): “As such, a heterog - neous range of multi-wavelength data was used to targetBOSS quasars, and a number of methods were incorporated into the survey in addition toXDQSO (Richards et al. 2009; Yèche et al. 2010; Kirkpatrick et al. 2011; see Ross et al. 2012b).”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III DR9 Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: testing deviations from Λ and general relativity using anisotropic clustering of galaxies (2012, methodology): “5 we present constraints on deviations formΛCDMGR.”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III DR9 Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: constraints on primordial non-Gaussianity (2012, methodology): “In particular, the sample has been simulated with 600 mock galaxy catalogs (Manera et al. 2012) and the issues identified by Ross et al. (2011) have been addressed via the application of an un-biased weighting scheme (Ross et al. 2012).”
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): “Note that Ross et al. (2012) explicitly verify that the BAO scale is insensitive to these systematic effects.”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: single-probe measurements from CMASS anisotropic galaxy clustering (2013, methodology): “1] or more details in Ross et al. 2012), we include the systematics model for only the monopole of the theoretical model by ξ ′0,th(s) = ξ0,th(s) + A(s), (12) Figure 1.”
Target Selection and Validation of DESI Luminous Red Galaxies (2022, background): “For example, Ross et al. (2012) found that the redshift efficiency of the BOSS CMASS sample varies with the fiber location on the focal plane.”
The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: mock galaxy catalogues for the BOSS Final Data Release (2015, result): “See also Ross et al. (2012) and Chuang et al. (2013) for similar studies on an earlier BOSS data set and Huterer et al. (2013) for potential photometric calibration systematics, which have not been accounted for in this analysis.”
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological analysis of the DR12 galaxy sample (2016, background): “The localized three-dimensional nature of the BAO feature makes BAO measurements robust to most observational systematics (see Ross et al. 2012, 2016), which tend to introduce only smooth distortions in clustering measurements.”
PHOTOMETRIC CALIBRATION OF THE FIRST 1.5 YEARS OF THE PAN-STARRS1 SURVEY (2012, background): “Uncertainty in the photometric calibration even at the 1% level can contribute to significant variation in the number densities of galaxies used for clustering studies on large angular scales (Ross et al. 2012).”
The completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: BAO and RSD measurements from the anisotropic power spectrum of the quasar sample between redshift 0.8 and 2.2 (2020, methodology): “Then, a weight, wsys, is used to account for the fact that the density of targets depends on the imaging conditions (Ross et al. 2012; Ata et al. 2017; Bautista & Dawson 2018).”