A Method for Measuring the Bias of High-Redshift Galaxies from Cosmic Variance

Abstract

As deeper observations discover increasingly distant galaxies, characterizing the properties of high-redshift galaxy populations will become increasingly challenging and paramount. We present a method for measuring the clustering bias of high-redshift galaxies from the field-to-field scatter in their number densities induced by cosmic variance. Multiple widely-separated fields are observed to provide a large number of statistically-independent samples of the high-redshift galaxy population. The expected Poisson uncertainty is removed from the measured dispersion in the distribution of galaxy number counts observed across these many fields, leaving, on average, only the contribution to the scatter expected from cosmic variance. With knowledge of the Lambda Cold Dark Matter power spectrum, the galaxy bias is then calculated from the measured cosmic variance. The results of cosmological N-body simulations can then be used to estimate the halo mass associated with the measured bias. We use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that Hubble Space Telescope pure parallel programs will be able to determine galaxy bias at z>~6 using this method, complementing future measurements from correlation functions.

Accepted by ApJ Letters

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• The Cosmic Web Around The Brightest Galaxies During The Epoch Of Reionization
• J-PLUS: The star formation main sequence and rate density at d < 75 Mpc
• The ALHAMBRA survey : Estimation of the clustering signal encoded in the cosmic variance
• Observational determination of the galaxy bias from cosmic variance with a random pointing survey: Clustering of z~2 galaxies from Hubble's BoRG survey
• The End of Galaxy Surveys
• Impact of Cosmic Variance on the Galaxy-Halo Connection for Lyman-$\alpha$ Emitters
• A novel analysis of contamination in Lyman-break galaxy samples at $\mathbf{z}\sim 6-8$: spatial correlation with intermediate-redshift galaxies at $\mathbf{z}\sim 1.3-2$