Acoustic Scale from the Angular Power Spectra of SDSS-III DR8 Photometric Luminous Galaxies

Citation:

Seo H-J, Ho S, White M, Cuesta AJ, Ross AJ, Saito S, Reid B, Padmanabhan N, Percival WJ, de Putter R, et al. Acoustic Scale from the Angular Power Spectra of SDSS-III DR8 Photometric Luminous Galaxies. The Astrophysical Journal. 2012;761 :13.

Date Published:

December 1, 2012

Abstract:

We measure the acoustic scale from the angular power spectra of theSloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) Data Release 8 imaging catalogthat includes 872, 921 galaxies over ~10,000 deg2 between0.45 < z < 0.65. The extensive spectroscopic training set of theBaryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey luminous galaxies allows preciseestimates of the true redshift distributions of galaxies in our imagingcatalog. Utilizing the redshift distribution information, we buildtemplates and fit to the power spectra of the data, which are measuredin our companion paper, to derive the location of Baryon acousticoscillations (BAOs) while marginalizing over many free parameters toexclude nearly all of the non-BAO signal. We derive the ratio of theangular diameter distance to the sound horizon scale DA(z)/rs = 9.212+0.416 - 0.404 at z= 0.54, and therefore DA (z) = 1411 ± 65 Mpc at z =0.54; the result is fairly independent of assumptions on the underlyingcosmology. Our measurement of angular diameter distance DA(z) is 1.4σ higher than what is expected for the concordanceΛCDM, in accordance to the trend of other spectroscopic BAOmeasurements for z >~ 0.35. We report constraints on cosmologicalparameters from our measurement in combination with the WMAP7 data andthe previous spectroscopic BAO measurements of SDSS and WiggleZ. Werefer to our companion papers (Ho et al. de Putter et al.) forinvestigations on information of the full power spectrum.

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