The ALHAMBRA survey : Estimation of the clustering signal encoded in the cosmic variance

Abstract

The relative cosmic variance (${\sigma }_v$) is a fundamental source of uncertainty in pencil-beam surveys and, as a particular case of count-in-cell statistics, can be used to estimate the bias between galaxies and their underlying dark-matter distribution. Our goal is to test the significance of the clustering information encoded in the ${\sigma }_v$ measured in the ALHAMBRA survey. We measure the cosmic variance of several galaxy populations selected with $B-$band luminosity at $0.35\le z<1.05$ as the intrinsic dispersion in the number density distribution derived from the 48 ALHAMBRA subfields. We compare the observational ${\sigma }_v$ with the cosmic variance of the dark matter expected from the theory, ${\sigma }_{v,\mathrm{dm}}$. This provides an estimation of the galaxy bias $b$. The galaxy bias from the cosmic variance is in excellent agreement with the bias estimated by two-point correlation function analysis in ALHAMBRA. This holds for different redshift bins, for red and blue subsamples, and for several $B-$band luminosity selections. We find that $b$ increases with the $B-$band luminosity and the redshift, as expected from previous work. Moreover, red galaxies have a larger bias than blue galaxies, with a relative bias of $b_{\mathrm{rel}}=1.4\pm 0.2$. Our results demonstrate that the cosmic variance measured in ALHAMBRA is due to the clustering of galaxies and can be used to characterise the ${\sigma }_v$ affecting pencil-beam surveys. In addition, it can also be used to estimate the galaxy bias $b$ from a method independent of correlation functions.

Astronomy and Astrophysics, in press. 9 pages, 4 figures, 3 tables

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Cited by in corpus (8)

• J-PLUS: On the identification of new cluster members in the double galaxy cluster A2589 & A2593 using PDFs
• The best fit for the observed galaxy Counts-in-Cell distribution function
• The ALHAMBRA survey : $B-$band luminosity function of quiescent and star-forming galaxies at $0.2\le z<1$ by PDF analysis
• J-PLUS: The star formation main sequence and rate density at d < 75 Mpc
• Halo Counts-in-cells for Cosmological Models with Different Dark Energy
• Observational determination of the galaxy bias from cosmic variance with a random pointing survey: Clustering of z~2 galaxies from Hubble's BoRG survey
• A $K_s$-band selected catalogue of objects in the ALHAMBRA survey
• The miniJPAS survey. Evolution of the luminosity and stellar mass functions of galaxies up to $z\sim 0.7$