Beecroft Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology

Abstract:

Morphology is a powerful indicator of a galaxy's dynamical and merger history. It is strongly correlated with many physical parameters, including mass, star formation history and the distribution of mass. The Galaxy Zoo project collected simple morphological classifications of nearly 900,000 galaxies drawn from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, contributed by hundreds of thousands of volunteers. This large number of classifications allows us to exclude classifier error, and measure the influence of subtle biases inherent in morphological classification. This paper presents the data collected by the project, alongside measures of classification accuracy and bias. The data are now publicly available and full catalogues can be downloaded in electronic format from http://data.galaxyzoo.org.

Abstract:

We propose a novel method for the extraction of the baryonic acoustic oscillation scale in galaxy photometric surveys. The evolution of this scale can be used as a standard ruler in order to constrain cosmological parameters. The method consists in parametrize the angular correlation function ω(θ), with a simple analitical expresion, in order to extract the sound horizon scale. The method has been tested in the MICE simulation, one of the largest N-body simulation to date. We have considered projection effects, non-linearities and observational effects in our analysis, obtaining errors in cosmological parameters in agreement with what is expected in new generation surveys.