THE BARYON OSCILLATION SPECTROSCOPIC SURVEY OF SDSS-III

• Published in: The Astronomical journal Vol. 145; no. 1; pp. 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: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Astronomical Society 01.01.2013
• 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; Cosmology and Extragalactic Astrophysics; Astrophysics
• ISSN: 0004-6256; 1538-3881; 1538-3881
• DOI: 10.1088/0004-6256/145/1/10

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.