THE BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY OF SDSS-III

Journal Article · Tue Jan 01 00:00:00 EST 2013 · Astronomical Journal (New York, N.Y. Online)

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1088/0004-6256/145/1/10· OSTI ID:22089735

Dawson, Kyle S.; Ahn, Christopher P.; Bolton, Adam S. ^[1]; Schlegel, David J.; Bailey, Stephen ^[2]; Anderson, Scott F.; Bhardwaj, Vaishali ^[3]; Aubourg, Eric; Bautista, Julian E. ^[4]; Barkhouser, Robert H. ^[5]; Beifiori, Alessandra ^[6]; Berlind, Andreas A. ^[7]; Bizyaev, Dmitry; Brewington, Howard ^[8]; Blake, Cullen H. ^[9]; Blanton, Michael R. ^[10]; Blomqvist, Michael ^[11]; Borde, Arnaud ^[12]; Bovy, Jo ^[13]; others, and

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1. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT 84112 (United States)
2. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, One Cyclotron Road, Berkeley, CA 94720 (United States)
3. Department of Astronomy, University of Washington, Box 351580, Seattle, WA 98195 (United States)
4. APC, University of Paris Diderot, CNRS/IN2P3, CEA/IRFU, Observatoire de Paris, Sorbonne Paris Cite (France)
5. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218 (United States)
6. Max-Planck-Institut fuer Extraterrestrische Physik, Giessenbachstrasse, D-85748 Garching (Germany)
7. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Vanderbilt University, VU Station 1807, Nashville, TN 37235 (United States)
8. Apache Point Observatory, P.O. Box 59, Sunspot, NM 88349 (United States)
9. Department of Astrophysical Sciences, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 (United States)
10. Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics, Department of Physics, New York University, 4 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003 (United States)
11. Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine, CA 92697 (United States)
12. CEA, Centre de Saclay, Irfu/SPP, F-91191 Gif-sur-Yvette (France)
13. Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein Drive, Princeton, NJ 08540 (United States)

The Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) is designed to measure the scale of baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter over a larger volume than the combined efforts of all previous spectroscopic surveys of large-scale structure. BOSS uses 1.5 million luminous galaxies as faint as i = 19.9 over 10,000 deg{sup 2} to measure BAO to redshifts z < 0.7. Observations of neutral hydrogen in the Ly{alpha} forest in more than 150,000 quasar spectra (g < 22) will constrain BAO over the redshift range 2.15 < z < 3.5. Early results from BOSS include the first detection of the large-scale three-dimensional clustering of the Ly{alpha} forest and a strong detection from the Data Release 9 data set of the BAO in the clustering of massive galaxies at an effective redshift z = 0.57. We project that BOSS will yield measurements of the angular diameter distance d{sub A} to an accuracy of 1.0% at redshifts z = 0.3 and z = 0.57 and measurements of H(z) to 1.8% and 1.7% at the same redshifts. Forecasts for Ly{alpha} forest constraints predict a measurement of an overall dilation factor that scales the highly degenerate D{sub A} (z) and H {sup -1}(z) parameters to an accuracy of 1.9% at z {approx} 2.5 when the survey is complete. Here, we provide an overview of the selection of spectroscopic targets, planning of observations, and analysis of data and data quality of BOSS.

• OSTI ID: 22089735
• Journal Information: Astronomical Journal (New York, N.Y. Online), Vol. 145, Issue 1; Other Information: Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1538-3881
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

79 ASTROPHYSICS
COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
ACCURACY
ASTRONOMY
ASTROPHYSICS
BARYONS
COSMOLOGY
DATA ANALYSIS
DISTANCE
EMISSION SPECTRA
GALAXIES
HYDROGEN
LYMAN LINES
OSCILLATIONS
QUASARS
RADIATION DETECTION
RED SHIFT
THREE-DIMENSIONAL CALCULATIONS