The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: measuring the cosmic expansion history using the Alcock-Paczynski test and distant supernovae

By C. Blake, Karl Glazebrook, T. Davis, S. Brough, M. Colless, C. Contreras, W. Couch, Scott M. Croom, Michael Drinkwater, K. Forster and 15 more. 2011

144 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Astronomical observations suggest that today’s Universe is dominated by a dark energy of unknown physical origin. One of the most notable results obtained from many models is that dark energy should cause the expansion of the Universe to accelerate: but the expansion rate as a function of time has proved very difficult to measure directly. We present a new determination of the cosmic expansion history by combining distant supernovae observations with a geometrical analysis of large-scale galaxy clustering within the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey, using the Alcock–Paczynski test to measure the distortion of standard spheres. Our result constitutes a robust and non-parametric measurement of the Hubble expansion rate as a function of time, which we measure with 10–15 per cent precision in four bins within the redshift range 0.1 < z < 0.9. We demonstrate, in a manner insensitive to the assumed cosmological model, that the cosmic expansion is accelerating. Furthermore, we find that this expansion history is consistent with a cosmological-constant dark energy.

Subfields: Astronomy and Astrophysics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f8d94d46eac05e7d5ab502b9f19b0cf237407092

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In Astronomy and Astrophysics

1. D. Schneider
2. Daniel J. Eisenstein
3. Simon D. M. White
4. Will J. Percival
5. Volker Springel
6. P. Hopkins
7. L. Hernquist
8. J. Tinker

Citations in the corpus

• Observational probes of cosmic acceleration (2012, methodology): “Combining the WiggleZ, SDSS+2dFGRS (Percival et al., 2010), and 6dFGS BAO measurements with WMAP7 and the Union-2 SN compilation, Blake et al. (2011d) infer Ωm = 0.289±0.015, H0 = 68.7± 1.9 km s−1 Mpc−1, ΩK = −0.004± 0.006, and w = −1.03± 0.08 (where w is assumed to be constant with redshift).”
• Measuring DA and H at z = 0.35 from the SDSS DR7 LRGs using baryon acoustic oscillations (2012, methodology): “…2005; Eisenstein et al. 2005; Hütsi 2006; Tegmark et al. 2006; Percival et al. 2007; Kazin et al. 2010a; Percival et al. 2010; Beutler et al. 2011; Blake et al. 2011a; Mehta et al. 2012; Padmanabhan et al. 2012; Xu et al. 2012), which only allow us to measure the spherically averaged distance…”
• The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological analysis of the DR12 galaxy sample (2016, methodology): “The right panel of Figure 15 compares our measurements of fσ8 results those from other surveys: 2dfGRS (Percival et al. 2004b), 6dFGS (Beutler et al. 2012), GAMA (Blake et al. 2013), WiggleZ (Blake et al. 2012), VVDS (Guzzo et al. 2008), and VIPERS (de la Torre et al. 2013), as well as the measureme”
• Weighing the giants – IV. Cosmology and neutrino mass (2014, methodology): “The galaxy survey data include results from 6dF (Beutler et al. 2012), SDSS (Reid et al. 2012) and the WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey (Blake et al. 2011).”
• The WiggleZ Dark Energy Survey: joint measurements of the expansion and growth history at z < 1 (2012, methodology): “By equating radial and tangential physical scales, independently of any underlying standard ruler, the observable ∆z/∆θ ∼ (1+z)DA(z)H(z)/c may be determined (Outram et al. 2004, Marinoni & Buzzi 2010, Blake et al. 2011c).”
• NINE-YEAR WILKINSON MICROWAVE ANISOTROPY PROBE (WMAP) OBSERVATIONS: COSMOLOGICAL PARAMETER RESULTS (2012, background): “Hudson & Turnbull (2012) combine redshift-space distortion data from BOSS (Reid et al. 2012), 6dFGS (Beutler et al. 2012), and WiggleZ (Blake et al. 2011), with local measurements of the peculiar velocity field, to find Ωm = 0.259 ± 0.045, σ8 = 0.748± 0.035, and a growth rate of γ ≡ d lnD/d ln a =…”
• The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: single-probe measurements from CMASS anisotropic galaxy clustering (2013, methodology): “WiggleZ collected spectra of 240 000 emission-line galaxies at 0.5 < z < 1 over 1000 deg2 (Drinkwater et al. 2010; Parkinson et al. 2012), and the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS; Dawson et al. 2013) of the SDSS-III (Eisenstein et al. 2011) is surveying 1.5 million luminous red galaxie”
• The 6dF Galaxy Survey: z \approx 0 measurement of the growth rate and sigma_8 (2012, methodology): “Blake et al. 2011c, Mon.”
• The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: measurements of the growth of structure and expansion rate at z = 0.57 from anisotropic clustering (2012, methodology): “The WiggleZ survey has recently analysed the anisotropic clustering of bright emission line galaxies over a broad redshift range (Blake et al. 2011b,c).”
• The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: Testing gravity with redshift-space distortions using the power spectrum multipoles (2013, methodology): “…= Ngal∑ i wc(xi)wFKP(xi)eik·xiL (k̂ · x̂i), (10) R (k) = Nran∑ i wFKP(xi)eik·xiL (k̂ · x̂i), (11) the power spectrum estimate is given by (Yamamoto et al. 2006; Blake et al. 2011a) P (k) = (2 + 1) 2A [( D (k) − α′R (k) ) × (D0(k) − α′R0(k))∗ − S ] , (12) where the ∗ represents the complex…”
• The EAGLE simulations of galaxy formation: calibration of subgrid physics and model variations (2015, background): “…cluster galaxies (e.g. Rozo et al. 2010), tests of the cosmic expansion rate (e.g. Blake et al. 2011a) and the distance– redshift relation (e.g. Blake et al. 2011b), redshift-space distortions of the two-point correlation function (e.g. Beutler et al. 2012) and C© 2015 The Authors Published…”
• Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the Ly-\alpha\ forest of BOSS quasars (2012, methodology): “The measurements of Blake et al. (2011b) use supernova data and therefor measureH(z) relative toH0.”
• Backreaction in Late-Time Cosmology (2011, background): “Analysis of large scale structure [25], especially in combination with supernova data [26] can provide strong constraints on the evolution of the Hubble parameter, though these constraints depend on the assumption that the universe is close to FLRW.”
• 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): “The AP effect has been recently used to jointly measureDA, H and fσ8 in three redshift bins from WiggleZ survey (Blake et al. 2012) and using the SDSS-II LRG sample (Chuang & Wang 2012).”