THE BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY OF SDSS-III

THE BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY OF SDSS-III

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...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:The Astronomical journal 2013-01, Vol.145 (1), p.1-41
Main Authors: Dawson, Kyle S, Schlegel, David J, Ahn, Christopher P, Anderson, Scott F, Aubourg, Eric, Bailey, Stephen, BARKHOUSER, ROBERT H, Bautista, Julian E, BEIFIORI, ALESSANDRA, Berlind, Andreas A
Format: Article
Language:eng
Subjects:
ACCURACY
ASTRONOMY
ASTROPHYSICS
ASTROPHYSICS, COSMOLOGY AND ASTRONOMY
BARYONS
Clustering
COSMOLOGY
Cosmology and Extra-Galactic Astrophysics
DATA ANALYSIS
DISTANCE
EMISSION SPECTRA
Forests
GALAXIES
HYDROGEN
LYMAN LINES
OSCILLATIONS
Physics
QUASARS
RADIATION DETECTION
RED SHIFT
Sciences of the Universe
Sky surveys (astronomy)
Spectroscopic analysis
Spectroscopy
Surveys
THREE-DIMENSIONAL CALCULATIONS
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary: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 super(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 yieldmeasurements 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 super(-1)(z) parameters to an accuracy of 1.9% at z ~ 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.
ISSN:0004-6256
1538-3881
1538-3881