Estimating the galaxy correlation function in an N-body simulation

• Grant number: 13/11345-9
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Scientific Initiation
• Start date: August 01, 2013
• End date: July 31, 2015
• Field of knowledge: Physical Sciences and Mathematics - Astronomy - Extragalactic Astrophysics
• Principal Investigator: Luis Raul Weber Abramo
• Grantee: Igor Rosiello Zenker
• Host Institution: Instituto de Física (IF). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Associated research grant: 12/00800-4 - The 3-D universe: astrophysics with large galaxy surveys, AP.TEM

Abstract

A large body of observational evidence points to two distinct forms of invisible matter/energy in the Universe: dark energy and dark matter. Within a few years, astronomical observations will begin to shed light into the nature of these mysterious dark components. One of the observations which should play a key role in the astronomy of the dark sector are the three-dimensional maps of the Universe which will be compiled by several large-area astrophysical surveys. In this Scientific Initiation (Iniciação Científica, IC) we will study the properties of the matter distribution, both in simulations and in a simple dataset. The simulated data is the {\it Millennium}, for which a mock galaxy catalog,together with the light-cones, has already been produced by our collaborators, E. Días e A. Zandivares -- seehttps://sites.google.com/site/jpasmockcatalogues/description. The actual dataset we plan to use in this project is the SDSS Luminous Red Galaxies dataset (Tegmark et al. 2006).The goal of this IC project is for the student to learn how to characterize the distribution of the large-scale structure of the Universe in terms of the correlation function and/or the spectrum, and to understand their physical contents. For the estimation of the correlation function and spectrum we will employ both the LS (Landy \& Szalay 1993) estimator, and we will attempt a realization of the FKP (Feldman, Kaiser \& Peacock 1994) "optimal" method to recover the power spectrum. (AU)