The BOSS Lyman-alpha Forest Sample from SDSS Data Release 9

Abstract

We present the BOSS Lyman-alpha (Lya) Forest Sample from SDSS Data Release 9, comprising 54,468 quasar spectra with zqso > 2.15 suitable for Lya forest analysis. This data set probes the intergalactic medium with absorption redshifts 2.0 < z_alpha < 5.7 over an area of 3275 square degrees, and encompasses an approximate comoving volume of 20 h^-3 Gpc^3. With each spectrum, we have included several products designed to aid in Lya forest analysis: improved sky masks that flag pixels where data may be unreliable, corrections for known biases in the pipeline estimated noise, masks for the cores of damped Lya systems and corrections for their wings, and estimates of the unabsorbed continua so that the observed flux can be converted to a fractional transmission. The continua are derived using a principal component fit to the quasar spectrum redwards of restframe Lya (lambda > 1216 Ang), extrapolated into the forest region and normalized by a linear function to fit the expected evolution of the Lya forest mean-flux. The estimated continuum errors are ~5% rms. We also discuss possible systematics arising from uncertain spectrophotometry and artifacts in the flux calibration; global corrections for the latter are provided. Our sample provides a convenient starting point for users to analyze clustering in BOSS Lya forest data, and it provides a fiducial data set that can be used to compare results from different analyses of baryon acoustic oscillations in the Lya forest. The full data set is available from the SDSS-III DR9 web site.

15 pages, 11 figures; Submitted to AJ

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Cited by in corpus (69)

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• First Detection of Cosmic Microwave Background Lensing and Lyman-α Forest Bispectrum
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• Suppression of Low-mass Galaxy Formation around Quasars at z~2-3
• Measurements of effective optical depth in the Ly$\alpha$ forest from the BOSS DR12 Quasar sample
• 3D Distribution Map of HI Gas and Galaxies Around an Enormous Ly$\alpha$ Nebula and Three QSOs at $z=2.3$ Revealed by the HI Tomographic Mapping Technique
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• Deep Forest: Neural Network reconstruction of the Lyman-alpha forest
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• The Effect of Interstellar Absorption on Measurements of the Baryon Acoustic Peak in the Lyman-α Forest
• Lyman-alpha Forest Tomography of the z>2 Cosmic Web