The Three‐dimensional Power Spectrum from Angular Clustering of Galaxies in Early Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data
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Abstract
Early photometric data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) contain angular positions for 1.5 million galaxies. In companion papers, the angular correlation functionw(θ) and two-dimensional power spectrumClof these galaxies are presented. Here we invert Limber's equation to extract the three-dimensional power spectrum from the angular results. We accomplish this using an estimate ofdn/dz, the redshift distribution of galaxies in four different magnitude slices in the SDSS photometric catalog. The resulting three-dimensional power spectrum estimates fromw(θ) andClagree with each other and with previous estimates over a range in wavenumbers 0.03 <k/(hMpc-1) < 1. The galaxies in the faintest magnitude bin (21 <r* < 22, which have median redshiftzm= 0.43) are less clustered than the galaxies in the brightest magnitude bin (18 <r* < 19 withzm= 0.17), especially on scales where nonlinearities are important. The derived power spectrum agrees with that of Szalay et al., who go directly from the raw data to a parametric estimate of the power spectrum. The strongest constraints on the shape parameter Γ come from the faintest galaxies (in the magnitude bin 21 <r* < 22), from which we infer Γ = 0.14(95% CL).