"We have spent a decade collecting measurements of 1.2 million galaxies over one quarter of the sky to map out the structure of the Universe over a volume of 650 cubic billion light years,” says. Jeremy Tinker of New York University, a co-leader of the scientific team that led this effort. Hundreds of scientists are part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III (SDSS-III) team.
These new measurements were carried out by the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS) programme of SDSS-III. Shaped by a continuous tug-of-war between dark matter and dark energy, the map revealed by BOSS allows astronomers to measure the expansion rate of the Universe by determining the size of the so-called baryonic acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the three-dimensional distribution of galaxies.
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Ref: The clustering of galaxies in the completed SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: cosmological analysis of the DR12 galaxy sample. arXiv - Astrophysics (11 July 2016) | arXiv:1607.03155 | PDF (Open Access)
ABSTRACT
We present cosmological results from the final galaxy clustering data set of the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our combined galaxy sample comprises 1.2 million massive galaxies over an effective area of 9329 deg^2 and volume of 18.7 Gpc^3, divided into three partially overlapping redshift slices centred at effective redshifts 0.38, 0.51, and 0.61. We measure the angular diameter distance DM and Hubble parameter H from the baryon acoustic oscillation (BAO) method after applying reconstruction to reduce non-linear effects on the BAO feature. Using the anisotropic clustering of the pre-reconstruction density field, we measure the product DM*H from the Alcock-Paczynski (AP) effect and the growth of structure, quantified by f{\sigma}8(z), from redshift-space distortions (RSD). We combine measurements presented in seven companion papers into a set of consensus values and likelihoods, obtaining constraints that are tighter and more robust than those from any one method. Combined with Planck 2015 cosmic microwave background measurements, our distance scale measurements simultaneously imply curvature {\Omega}K =0.0003+/-0.0026 and a dark energy equation of state parameter w = -1.01+/-0.06, in strong affirmation of the spatially flat cold dark matter model with a cosmological constant ({\Lambda}CDM). Our RSD measurements of f{\sigma}8, at 6 per cent precision, are similarly consistent with this model. When combined with supernova Ia data, we find H0 = 67.3+/-1.0 km/s/Mpc even for our most general dark energy model, in tension with some direct measurements. Adding extra relativistic species as a degree of freedom loosens the constraint only slightly, to H0 = 67.8+/-1.2 km/s/Mpc. Assuming flat {\Lambda}CDM we find {\Omega}_m = 0.310+/-0.005 and H0 = 67.6+/-0.5 km/s/Mpc, and we find a 95% upper limit of 0.16 eV/c^2 on the neutrino mass sum.
ADDITIONAL RESEARCH
Anisotropic galaxy clustering in Fourier-space. arXiv:1607.03150
Combining correlated Gaussian posterior distributions. arXiv:1607.03146
Angular clustering tomography and its cosmological implications. arXiv:1607.03144
Cosmological implications of the Fourier space wedges of the final sample. arXiv:1607.03143