Cosmological constraints from the clustering of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR7 luminous red galaxies

Citation:

Reid BA, Percival WJ, Eisenstein DJ, Verde L, Spergel DN, Skibba RA, Bahcall NA, Budavari T, Frieman JA, Fukugita M, et al. Cosmological constraints from the clustering of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey DR7 luminous red galaxies. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 2010;404 :60-85.

Date Published:

May 1, 2010

Abstract:

We present the power spectrum of the reconstructed halo density fieldderived from a sample of luminous red galaxies (LRGs) from the SloanDigital Sky Survey (SDSS) Seventh Data Release (DR7). The halo powerspectrum has a direct connection to the underlying dark matter power fork <= 0.2hMpc-1, well into the quasi-linear regime. Thisenables us to use a factor of ~8 more modes in the cosmological analysisthan an analysis with kmax = 0.1hMpc-1, as wasadopted in the SDSS team analysis of the DR4 LRG sample. The observedhalo power spectrum for 0.02 < k < 0.2hMpc-1 is wellfitted by our model: χ2 = 39.6 for 40 degrees of freedomfor the best-fitting Λ cold dark matter (ΛCDM) model. Wefind Ωmh2(ns/0.96)1.2= 0.141+0.010-0.012 for a power-law primordialpower spectrum with spectral index ns andΩbh2 = 0.02265 fixed, consistent with cosmicmicrowave background measurements. The halo power spectrum alsoconstrains the ratio of the comoving sound horizon at the baryon-dragepoch to an effective distance to z = 0.35:rs/DV(0.35) =0.1097+0.0039-0.0042. Combining the halo powerspectrum measurement with the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe(WMAP) 5 year results, for the flat ΛCDM model we findΩm = 0.289 +/- 0.019 and H0 = 69.4 +/-1.6kms-1Mpc-1. Allowing for massive neutrinos inΛCDM, we find eV at the 95 per cent confidence level. If weinstead consider the effective number of relativistic speciesNeff as a free parameter, we find Neff =4.8+1.8-1.7. Combining also with the Kowalski etal. supernova sample, we find Ωtot = 1.011 +/- 0.009and w = -0.99 +/- 0.11 for an open cosmology with constant dark energyequation of state w. The power spectrum and a module to calculate thelikelihoods are publicly available athttp://lambda.gsfc.nasa.gov/toolbox/lrgdr/.

Notes:

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