The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: combining correlated Gaussian posterior distributions

Citation:

Sánchez AG, Niklas Grieb J, Salazar-Albornoz S, Alam S, Beutler F, Ross AJ, Brownstein JR, Chuang C-H, Cuesta AJ, Eisenstein DJ, et al. The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: combining correlated Gaussian posterior distributions. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 2017;464 :1493-1501.

Date Published:

January 1, 2017

Abstract:

The cosmological information contained in anisotropic galaxy clusteringmeasurements can often be compressed into a small number of parameterswhose posterior distribution is well described by a Gaussian. We presenta general methodology to combine these estimates into a single set ofconsensus constraints that encode the total information of theindividual measurements, taking into account the full covariance betweenthe different methods. We illustrate this technique by applying it tocombine the results obtained from different clustering analyses,including measurements of the signature of baryon acoustic oscillationsand redshift-space distortions, based on a set of mock catalogues of thefinal SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). Ourresults show that the region of the parameter space allowed by theconsensus constraints is smaller than that of the individual methods,highlighting the importance of performing multiple analyses on galaxysurveys even when the measurements are highly correlated. This paper ispart of a set that analyses the final galaxy clustering data set fromBOSS. The methodology presented here is used in Alam et al. to producethe final cosmological constraints from BOSS.

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