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

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 consensu...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society 2016-09, Vol.464 (2)
Main Authors: Sánchez, Ariel G., Grieb, Jan Niklas, Salazar-Albornoz, Salvador, Alam, Shadab, Beutler, Florian, Ross, Ashley J., Brownstein, Joel R., Chuang, Chia-Hsun, Cuesta, Antonio J., Eisenstein, Daniel J., Kitaura, Francisco-Shu, Percival, Will J., Prada, Francisco, Rodríguez-Torres, Sergio, Seo, Hee-Jong, Tinker, Jeremy, Tojeiro, Rita, Vargas-Magaña, Mariana, Vazquez, Jose A., Zhao, Gong-Bo
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
ASTRONOMY AND ASTROPHYSICS
cosmological parameters
large-scale structure of Universe
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0035-8711
1365-2966