Higher Order Moments of the Angular Distribution of Galaxies from Early SDSS Data

Abstract

We present initial results for counts in cells statistics of the angular distribution of galaxies in early data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). We analyze a rectangular stripe $2.5^{\circ }$ wide, covering approximately 160 sq. degrees, containing over $10^6$ galaxies in the apparent magnitude range $18<r^{\prime }<22$, with areas of bad seeing, contamination from bright stars, ghosts, and high galactic extinction masked out. This survey region, which forms part of the SDSS Early Data Release, is the same as that for which two-point angular clustering statistics have recently been computed. The third and fourth moments of the cell counts, $s_3$ (skewness) and $s_4$ (kurtosis), constitute the most accurate measurements to date of these quantities (for $r^{\prime }<21$) over angular scales $0.015^{\circ }-0.3^{\circ }$. They display the approximate hierarchical scaling expected from non-linear structure formation models and are in reasonable agreement with the predictions of $\Lambda$-dominated cold dark matter models with galaxy biasing that suppresses higher order correlations at small scales. The results are in general consistent with previous measurements in the APM, EDSGC, and Deeprange surveys. These results suggest that the SDSS imaging data are free of systematics to a high degree and will therefore enable determination of the skewness and kurtosis to 1% and less then 10%, as predicted by Colombi, Szapudi, & Szalay (1998).

arXiv comment24 pages, submitted to ApJ

References in corpus (35)

• Maps of Dust IR Emission for Use in Estimation of Reddening and CMBR Foregrounds
• The Sloan Digital Sky Survey: Technical Summary
• How Many Galaxies Fit in a Halo? Constraints on Galaxy Formation Efficiency from Spatial Clustering
• Solar System Objects Observed in the SDSS Commissioning Data
• PTHalos: A fast method for generating mock galaxy distributions
• Large-scale bias in the Universe: bispectrum method
• Skewness and Kurtosis in Large-Scale Cosmic Fields
• The Bispectrum of IRAS Galaxies
• Skewness Induced by Gravity
• Constraints on Galaxy Bias, Matter Density, and Primordial Non--Gausianity from the PSCz Galaxy Redshift Survey
• Weakly Non-Linear Gaussian Fluctuations and the Edgeworth Expansion
• High-order galaxy correlation functions in the APM Galaxy Survey
• Clustering at High Redshift: Precise Constraints from a Deep, Wide Area Survey
• Cosmic Error and the Statistics of Large Scale Structure
• Moments of the Counts Distribution in the 1.2 Jy IRAS Redshift Survey
• Bias and high-order galaxy correlation functions in the APM Galaxy Survey
• Biased-estimations of the Variance and Skewness
• The Three-point Function as a Probe of Models for Large-scale Structure
• The Projected Three-point Correlation Function: Theory and Observations
• Higher Order Statistics from the EDSGC Survey I: Counts in Cells
• Cosmic Statistics of Statistics
• Effects of Sampling on Statistics of Large Scale Structure
• A New Method for Calculating Counts in Cells
• Extended Perturbation Theory for the Local Density Distribution Function
• Redshift distortions of galaxy correlation functions
• Gravitational Clustering from Chi^2 Initial Conditions
• Experimental Cosmic Statistics II: Distribution
• Quasi-Linear Evolution of Compensated Cosmological Perturbations: The Nonlinear Sigma Model
• Skewness as a probe of non-Gaussian initial conditions
• Experimental Cosmic Statistics I: Variance
• Kurtosis in Large-Scale Structure as a Constraint on Non-Gaussian Initial Conditions
• Higher Order Statistics from the Apm Galaxy Survey
• Comparison of the Large Scale Clustering in the APM and the EDSGC Galaxy Surveys
• Observational Constraints on Higher Order Clustering up to $z\simeq 1
• Large scale clustering from Non-Gaussian texture models

Cited by in corpus (35)

• Large-Scale Structure of the Universe and Cosmological Perturbation Theory
• Galaxy Clustering in Early SDSS Redshift Data
• The Galaxy-mass Correlation Function Measured from Weak Lensing in the SDSS
• Analysis of Systematic Effects and Statistical Uncertainties in Angular Clustering of Galaxies from Early SDSS Data
• Cosmology and the Bispectrum
• Galaxy Clustering and Galaxy Bias in a Lambda-CDM Universe
• An alternative to the cosmological 'concordance model'
• The Angular Correlation Function of Galaxies from Early SDSS Data
• The Effect of Large-Scale Structure on the SDSS Galaxy Three-Point Correlation Function
• Galaxy Bias and Halo-Occupation Numbers from Large-Scale Clustering
• The 2dF Galaxy Redshift Survey: higher order galaxy correlation functions
• Three-point Correlation Functions of SDSS Galaxies in Redshift Space: Morphology, Color, and Luminosity Dependence
• On Combining Galaxy Clustering and Weak Lensing to Unveil Galaxy Biasing via the Halo Model
• Modeling the three-point correlation function
• Skewness as a test of the equivalence principle
• Two-Dimensional Topology of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey
• Three-Dimensional Genus Statistics of Galaxies in the SDSS Early Data Release
• Correlation between galaxies and QSO in the SDSS:na signal from gravitational lensing magnification?
• A New Algorithm for the Detection of Inter-cluster Galaxy Filaments using Galaxy Orientation Alignments
• Analysing Large Scale Structure: I. Weighted Scaling Indices and Constrained Randomisation
• Skewness as a test for Quartessence
• Higher-Order Angular Galaxy Correlations in the SDSS: Redshift and Color Dependence of non-Linear Bias
• Precision Measurements of Higher-Order Angular Galaxy Correlations Using 11 Million SDSS Galaxies
• Cosmological Perturbation Theory Using the Schrödinger Equation
• Three-point phase correlations: A new measure of non-linear large-scale structure
• GalICS V : Low and high order clustering in mock SDSS's
• The effects of Non-Gaussian initial conditions on the structure and substructure of Cold Dark Matter halos
• Measuring Linear and Non-linear Galaxy Bias Using Counts-in-Cells in the Dark Energy Survey Science Verification Data
• Degeneracy between CCDM and $\Lambda$CDM cosmologies
• Constraining Primordial Non-Gaussianity with Moments of the Large Scale Density Field
• Conditional Cumulants in Weakly Non-linear Regime
• 20+ years of Inflation
• Non-Gaussianity of the density distribution in accelerating universes
• Skewness of matter distribution in clustering dark energy cosmologies
• Non-Gaussianity of the density distribution in accelerating universes II:N-body simulations