Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology

Abstract:

This Perspective article reflects on the recent launch of Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries (http://conscicom.org), a collaboration between the Universities of Oxford and Leicester in partnership with the Natural History Museum, the Royal College of Surgeons, and the Royal Society. It is a multi-strand project, bringing together historians, literary scholars, and contemporary science practitioners, which has been awarded a large grant in the Arts and Humanities Research Council's Science in Culture theme. At its heart lie questions about public involvement in science, the amateur/professional divide, and the possibilities of drawing on understanding of the role of journals in the science and information revolution of the nineteenth century in order to enhance science participation in the digital age.

Abstract:

Using the Two Micron All Sky Survey Photometric Redshift catalogue we perform a number of statistical tests aimed at detecting possible departures from statistical homogeneity and isotropy in the large-scale structure of the Universe. Making use of the angular homogeneity index, an observable proposed in a previous publication, as well as studying the scaling of the angular clustering and number counts with magnitude limit, we place constraints on the fractal nature of the galaxy distribution. We find that the statistical properties of our sample are in excellent agreement with the standard cosmological model, and that it reaches the homogeneous regime significantly faster than a class of fractal models with dimensions D < 2.75. As part of our search for systematic effects, we also study the presence of hemispherical asymmetries in our data, finding no significant deviation beyond those allowed by the concordance model.