N-body simulations of gravitational redshifts and other relativistic distortions of galaxy clustering

Abstract

Large redshift surveys of galaxies and clusters are providing the first opportunities to search for distortions in the observed pattern of large-scale structure due to such effects as gravitational redshift. We focus on non-linear scales and apply a quasi-Newtonian approach using N-body simulations to predict the small asymmetries in the cross-correlation function of two galaxy different populations. Following recent work by Bonvin et al., Zhao and Peacock and Kaiser on galaxy clusters, we include effects which enter at the same order as gravitational redshift: the transverse Doppler effect, light-cone effects, relativistic beaming, luminosity distance perturbation and wide-angle effects. We find that all these effects cause asymmetries in the cross-correlation functions. Quantifying these asymmetries, we find that the total effect is dominated by the gravitational redshift and luminosity distance perturbation at small and large scales, respectively. By adding additional subresolution modelling of galaxy structure to the large-scale structure information, we find that the signal is significantly increased, indicating that structure on the smallest scales is important and should be included. We report on comparison of our simulation results with measurements from the SDSS/BOSS galaxy redshift survey in a companion paper.

13 pages, 10 figures, published in MNRAS, see link for a combined video summary of this and three other related papers posted today: https://youtu.be/nESs6jsXBCs. An elementary introduction to gravitational redshift is here: https://youtu.be/6tbCk_4Tk10

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• New Perspective on Galaxy Clustering as a Cosmological Probe: General Relativistic Effects
• A 2.5% measurement of the growth rate from small-scale redshift space clustering of SDSS-III CMASS galaxies
• Relativistic distortions in the large-scale clustering of SDSS-III BOSS CMASS galaxies
• Gravitational Redshift of Galaxies in Clusters from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey
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Cited by in corpus (10)

• The Completed SDSS-IV extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: N-body Mock Challenge for the eBOSS Emission Line Galaxy Sample
• Dependence of halo bias on mass and environment
• Detectability of the gravitational redshift effect from the asymmetric galaxy clustering
• Using GAMA to probe the impact of small-scale galaxy physics on nonlinear redshift-space distortions
• Cosmological test of local position invariance from the asymmetric galaxy clustering
• Perturbed redshifts from N-body simulations
• BiGONLight: light propagation with bi-local operators in Numerical Relativity
• Cosmological Simulations of Number Counts
• Testing local position invariance with odd multipoles of galaxy clustering statistics
• Gravitational redshift from large-scale structure: nonlinearities, antisymmetries, and the dipole