0000000001317841
AUTHOR
P. Arnalte-mur
The ALHAMBRA survey: An empirical estimation of the cosmic variance for merger fraction studies based on close pairs
[Aims]: Our goal is to estimate empirically the cosmic variance that affects merger fraction studies based on close pairs for the first time. [Methods]: We compute the merger fraction from photometric redshift close pairs with 10 h−1 kpc ≤ rp ≤ 50 h−1 kpc and Δv ≤ 500 km s−1 and measure it in the 48 sub-fields of the ALHAMBRA survey. We study the distribution of the measured merger fractions that follow a log-normal function and estimate the cosmic variance σv as the intrinsic dispersion of the observed distribution. We develop a maximum likelihood estimator to measure a reliable σv and avoid the dispersion due to the observational errors (including the Poisson shot noise term). [Results]: …
The ALHAMBRA survey: Accurate merger fractions by PDF analysis of photometric close pairs
Our goal is to develop and test a novel methodology to compute accurate close pair fractions with photometric redshifts. We improve the current methodologies to estimate the merger fraction f_m from photometric redshifts by (i) using the full probability distribution functions (PDFs) of the sources in redshift space, (ii) including the variation in the luminosity of the sources with z in both the selection of the samples and in the luminosity ratio constrain, and (iii) splitting individual PDFs into red and blue spectral templates to deal robustly with colour selections. We test the performance of our new methodology with the PDFs provided by the ALHAMBRA photometric survey. The merger frac…
Baryon Acoustic Oscillations in LRGs
Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) have been previously detected using correlation functions and power spectra of the galaxy distribution. In this work, we present a new method for the detection of the real-space structures associated with this feature. These baryon acoustic structures are spherical shells with a relatively small density contrast, surrounding high density central regions. We design a specific wavelet adapted to the search for shells, and exploit the physics of the process by making use of two different mass tracers, introducing a specific statistic to detect the BAO features. We apply our method to the detection of BAO in a galaxy sample drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Sur…