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

István Szapudi, Joshua A Frieman, Roman Scoccimarro, Alexander S Szalay, Andrew J Connolly, Scott Dodelson, Daniel J Eisenstein, James E Gunn, David Johnston, Stephen Kent, …
ArXiv.org
02 Nov 2001
DOI: https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/0111058
url
https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.astro-ph/0111058View
Preprint (Author's original)arXiv.org - Non-exclusive license to distribute,  Open

Abstract

Physics - Astrophysics of Galaxies Physics - Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics Physics - Earth and Planetary Astrophysics Physics - High Energy Astrophysical Phenomena Physics - Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Physics - Solar and Stellar Astrophysics
Astrophys.J. 570 (2002) 75-85 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).

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