Testing homogeneity with galaxy star formation histories
Date
12/12/2012Metadata
Show full item recordAltmetrics Handle Statistics
Altmetrics DOI Statistics
Abstract
Observationally confirming spatial homogeneity on sufficiently large cosmological scales is of importance to test one of the underpinning assumptions of cosmology, and is also imperative for correctly interpreting dark energy. A challenging aspect of this is that homogeneity must be probed inside our past light cone, while observations take place on the light cone. The star formation history (SFH) in the galaxy fossil record provides a novel way to do this. We calculate the SFH of stacked luminous red galaxy (LRG) spectra obtained from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We divide the LRG sample into 12 equal-area contiguous sky patches and 10 redshift slices (0.2 < z < 0.5), which correspond to 120 blocks of volume ~0.04 Gpc3. Using the SFH in a time period that samples the history of the universe between look-back times 11.5 and 13.4 Gyr as a proxy for homogeneity, we calculate the posterior distribution for the excess large-scale variance due to inhomogeneity, and find that the most likely solution is no extra variance at all. At 95% credibility, there is no evidence of deviations larger than 5.8%.
Citation
Hoyle , B , Tojeiro , R , Jimenez , R , Heavens , A , Clarkson , C & Maartens , R 2012 , ' Testing homogeneity with galaxy star formation histories ' , Astrophysical Journal Letters , vol. 762 , no. 1 , L9 . https://doi.org/10.1088/2041-8205/762/1/L9
Publication
Astrophysical Journal Letters
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
2041-8205Type
Journal article
Rights
Copyright © 2013. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. This work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. This is the final published version of the work, which was originally published at: https://doi.org/10.1088/2041-8205/762/1/L9
Collections
Items in the St Andrews Research Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.