Higher Order Moments of the Angular Distribution of Galaxies from Early Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data

Citation:

Szapudi I, Frieman JA, Scoccimarro R, Szalay AS, Connolly AJ, Dodelson S, Eisenstein DJ, Gunn JE, Johnston D, Kent S, et al. Higher Order Moments of the Angular Distribution of Galaxies from Early Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data. The Astrophysical Journal. 2002;570 :75-85.

Date Published:

May 1, 2002

Abstract:

We present initial results for counts in cell statistics of the angulardistribution of galaxies in early data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey(SDSS). We analyze a rectangular stripe 2.5d wide, coveringapproximately 160 deg2, containing over 106galaxies in the apparent magnitude range 18'<22, withareas of bad seeing, contamination from bright stars, ghosts, and highgalactic extinction masked out. This survey region, which forms part ofthe SDSS early data release, is the same as that for which two-pointangular clustering statistics have recently been computed. The third andfourth moments of the cell counts, s3 (skewness) ands4 (kurtosis), constitute the most accurate measurements todate of these quantities (for r'<21) over angular scales0.015d-0.3d. They display the approximate hierarchical scaling expectedfrom nonlinear structure formation models and are in reasonableagreement with the predictions of Λ-dominated cold dark mattermodels with galaxy biasing that suppresses higher order correlations atsmall scales. The results are, in general, consistent with previousmeasurements in the APM, EDSGC, and Deeprange surveys. These resultssuggest that the SDSS imaging data are free of systematics to a highdegree and will therefore enable determination of the skewness and

Notes:

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