2013/12/31 by Lauren Anderson, Eric Aubourg, Stephen Bailey +62
Physics and Astronomy · #astro-ph.CO
paper · pdf · doi:10.1093/mnras/stu523
40 pages, 29 figures; replaced with final version in journal
arxiv created 2014/06/03 · arxiv updated 2015/06/18
We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS), which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III). Our results come from the Data Release 11 (DR11) sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8 500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2<z<0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance ΛCDM cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7 σ in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, rd, which has a value of r_d,\rm fid=149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find DV=(1264±25 \rm Mpc)(rd/r_d,\rm fid) at z=0.32 and DV=(2056±20 \rm Mpc)(rd/r_d,\rm fid) at z=0.57. At 1.0 per cent, this latter measure is the most precise distance constraint ever obtained from a galaxy survey. Separating the clustering along and transverse to the line-of-sight yields measurements at z=0.57 of DA=(1421±20 \rm Mpc)(rd/r_d,\rm fid) and H=(96.8±3.4 \rm km/s/Mpc)(r_d,\rm fid/rd). Our measurements of the distance scale are in good agreement with previous BAO measurements and with the predictions from cosmic microwave background data for a spatially flat cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant.