Direct signatures of the formation time of galaxies

Abstract

We show that it is possible to directly measure the formation time of galaxies using large-scale structure. In particular, we show that the large-scale distribution of galaxies is sensitive to whether galaxies form over a narrow period of time before their observed times, or are formed over a time scale on the order of the age of the Universe. Along the way, we derive simple recursion relations for the perturbative terms of the most general bias expansion for the galaxy density, thus fully extending the famous dark-matter recursion relations to generic tracers.

PRD version, extended discussion, 5+3 pages, 1 figure, ancillary file included

References in corpus (8)

• The Effective Field Theory of Cosmological Large Scale Structures
• Clustering of dark matter tracers: generalizing bias for the coming era of precision LSS
• Halo assembly bias and its effects on galaxy clustering
• Analytic Prediction of Baryonic Effects from the EFT of Large Scale Structures
• An EFT description of galaxy intrinsic alignments
• An $n$-th order Lagrangian Forward Model for Large-Scale Structure
• Sigma-Eight at the Percent Level: The EFT Likelihood in Real Space
• On the origin of intrinsic alignment in cosmic shear measurements: an analytic argument

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Neutrino masses from large-scale structures: future sensitivity and theory dependence
• A semi-analytic estimate for the effective sound speed counterterm in the EFTofLSS