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The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: baryon acoustic oscillations in the Data Release 9 spectroscopic galaxy sample

Citation:

Anderson L, Aubourg E, Bailey S, Bizyaev D, Blanton M, Bolton AS, Brinkmann J, Brownstein JR, Burden A, Cuesta AJ, et al. The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: baryon acoustic oscillations in the Data Release 9 spectroscopic galaxy sample. Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. 2012;427 :3435-3467.

Date Published:

December 1, 2012

Abstract:

We present measurements of galaxy clustering from the Baryon OscillationSpectroscopic Survey (BOSS), which is part of the Sloan Digital SkySurvey III (SDSS-III). These use the Data Release 9 (DR9) CMASS sample,which contains 264 283 massive galaxies covering 3275 square degreeswith an effective redshift z = 0.57 and redshift range 0.43 < z <0.7. Assuming a concordance ΛCDM cosmological model, this samplecovers an effective volume of 2.2 Gpc3, and represents thelargest sample of the Universe ever surveyed at this density,n¯≈3×10-4 h-3 Mpc 3. We measure theangle-averaged galaxy correlation function and power spectrum, includingdensity-field reconstruction of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO)feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of5σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Combiningwith the SDSS-II luminous red galaxy sample, the detection significanceincreases to 6.7σ. Fitting for the position of the acousticfeatures measures the distance to z = 0.57 relative to the sound horizonDV/rs = 13.67 ± 0.22 at z = 0.57. Assuminga fiducial sound horizon of 153.19 Mpc, which matches cosmic microwavebackground constraints, this corresponds to a distance DV (z= 0.57) = 2094 ± 34 Mpc. At 1.7 per cent, this is the mostprecise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. We placethis result alongside previous BAO measurements in a cosmologicaldistance ladder and find excellent agreement with the current supernovameasurements. We use these distance measurements to constrain variouscosmological models, finding continuing support for a flat Universe witha cosmological constant.

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