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

Journal Article · · Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society
 [1];  [2];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [5];  [6];  [7];  [8];  [9];  [10];  [11];  [12];  [13];  [14];  [15];  [16];  [17];  [18];  [19]
  1. Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching (Germany)
  2. Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, Garching (Germany); Univ. Observatory Munich (Germany)
  3. Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA (United States). Dept. of Physics and McWilliams Center for Cosmology
  4. Univ. of Portsmouth (United Kingdom). Inst. of Cosmology and Gravitation; Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
  5. Univ. of Portsmouth (United Kingdom). Inst. of Cosmology and Gravitation; The Ohio State Univ., Columbus, OH (United States). Center for Cosmology and Astro-Particle Physics
  6. Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT (United States). Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
  7. Autonomous Univ. of Madrid (Spain). Inst. of Theoretical Physics; Leibniz Inst. for Astrophysics Potsdam (Germany)
  8. Univ. of Barcelona (Spain). Inst. of Cosmic Sciences
  9. Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Cambridge, MA (United States)
  10. Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States); Leibniz Inst. for Astrophysics Potsdam (Germany); Univ. of California, Berkeley, CA (United States). Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
  11. Univ. of Portsmouth (United Kingdom). Inst. of Cosmology and Gravitation
  12. Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT (United States). Dept. of Physics and Astronomy; Campus of International Excellence UAM, Madrid (Spain); Inst. of Astrophysics of Andalucia, Granada (Spain)
  13. Univ. of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT (United States). Dept. of Physics and Astronomy; Campus of International Excellence UAM, Madrid (Spain); Autonomous Univ. of Madrid (Spain). Dept. of Theoretical Physics
  14. Ohio Univ., Athens, OH (United States). Dept. of Physics and Astronomy
  15. New York Univ., NY (United States). Cetner for Cosmology and Particle Physics
  16. Univ. of St. Andrews, Scotland (United Kingdom). School of Physics and Astronomy
  17. Carnegie Mellon Univ., Pittsburgh, PA (United States). Dept. of Physics and McWilliams Center for Cosmology; Autonomous National Univ. of Mexico, Mexico DF (Mexico)
  18. Brookhaven National Lab. (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
  19. Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), Beijing (China). National Astronomy Observatories
+ Show Author Affiliations

The cosmological information contained in anisotropic galaxy clustering measurements can often be compressed into a small number of parameters whose posterior distribution is well described by a Gaussian. Here, we present a general methodology to combine these estimates into a single set of consensus constraints that encode the total information of the individual measurements, taking into account the full covariance between the different methods. We also illustrate this technique by applying it to combine the results obtained from different clustering analyses, including measurements of the signature of baryon acoustic oscillations and redshift-space distortions, based on a set of mock catalogues of the final SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS). Our results show that the region of the parameter space allowed by the consensus constraints is smaller than that of the individual methods, highlighting the importance of performing multiple analyses on galaxy surveys even when the measurements are highly correlated. Our paper is part of a set that analyses the final galaxy clustering data set from BOSS. The methodology presented here is used in Alam et al. to produce the final cosmological constraints from BOSS.

Research Organization:
Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL), Upton, NY (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Science (SC), High Energy Physics (HEP)
Grant/Contract Number:
SC00112704
OSTI ID:
1336116
Report Number(s):
BNL-112565-2016-JA; KA2301020
Journal Information:
Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Vol. 464, Issue 2; ISSN 0035-8711
Publisher:
Royal Astronomical SocietyCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English
Citation Metrics:
Cited by: 33 works
Citation information provided by
Web of Science

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Cited By (14)

The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: tomographic BAO analysis of DR12 combined sample in Fourier space journal December 2016
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: constraining modified gravity journal January 2018
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: a tomographic analysis of structure growth and expansion rate from anisotropic galaxy clustering journal September 2018
Beyond BAO: Improving cosmological constraints from BOSS data with measurement of the void-galaxy cross-correlation journal July 2019
Analytic Calculation of Covariance between Cosmological Parameters from Correlated Data Sets, with an Application to SPTpol journal December 2019
Model-independent curvature determination with 21 cm intensity mapping experiments journal April 2018
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological analysis of the DR12 galaxy sample journal March 2017
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: tomographic BAO analysis of DR12 combined sample in configuration space journal May 2017
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: towards a computationally efficient analysis without informative priors journal March 2017
Nonlinear reconstruction of redshift space distortions journal February 2018
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: theoretical systematics and Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the galaxy correlation function journal March 2018
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: theoretical systematics and Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in the galaxy correlation function text January 2016
The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: constraining modified gravity text January 2016
Beyond BAO: improving cosmological constraints from BOSS with measurement of the void-galaxy cross-correlation text January 2019

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Related Subjects

79 ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
cosmological parameters
large-scale structure of Universe