A Computationally Efficient Approach for Calculating Galaxy Two-Point Correlations

We developed a modification to the calculation of the two-point correlation function commonly used in the analysis of large scale structure in cosmology. An estimator of the two-point correlation function is constructed by contrasting the observed distribution of galaxies with that of a uniformly po...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:arXiv.org 2017-12
Main Authors: Demina, Regina, Cheong, Sanha, Segev BenZvi, Hindrichs, Otto
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Angular position
Combinatorial analysis
Cosmology
Galaxies
Galaxy distribution
Large scale structure of the universe
Mathematical analysis
Parameters
Red shift
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Summary:We developed a modification to the calculation of the two-point correlation function commonly used in the analysis of large scale structure in cosmology. An estimator of the two-point correlation function is constructed by contrasting the observed distribution of galaxies with that of a uniformly populated random catalog. Using the assumption that the distribution of random galaxies in redshift is independent of angular position allows us to replace pairwise combinatorics with fast integration over probability maps. The new method significantly reduces the computation time while simultaneously increasing the precision of the calculation. It also allows to introduce cosmological parameters only at the last and least computationally expensive stage, which is helpful when exploring various choices for these parameters.
ISSN:2331-8422