Recently NAFU SA and other role players expressed some criticism about government programmes. The criticism was not so much about the objectives and content of these programmes, but rather about their accessibility, or lack thereof, to emerging farmers.

What about the messenger

In the current paradigm there is a non-trivial bias expected in the process of galaxy formation. Thus, the observed statistical properties of the galaxy distribution do not necessarily extend to the underlying matter distribution. Gravitational evolution of initially Gaussian seed fluctuations predicts that the connected moments of the matter fluctuations exhibit a hierarchical structure, at least in the limit of small dispersion. This same hierarchical structure has been found in the galaxy distribution, but it is not clear to what extent it reflects properties of the matter distribution or properties of a galaxy formation bias. In this paper we consider the consequences of an arbitrary, effectively local biasing transformation of a hierarchical underlying matter distribution. We show that a general form of such a transformation preserves the hierarchical properties and the shape of the dispersion in the limit of small fluctuations, i.e. on large scales, although the values of the

Biasing and Hierarchical Statistics in Large-scale Structure

In a six-year program started in 2014 July, the Extended Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (eBOSS) will conduct novel cosmological observations using the BOSS spectrograph at Apache Point Observatory. These observations will be conducted simultaneously with the Time Domain Spectroscopic Survey (TDSS) designed for variability studies and the Spectroscopic Identification of eROSITA Sources (SPIDERS) program designed for studies of X-ray sources. In particular, eBOSS will measure with percent-level precision the distance-redshift relation with baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of matter. eBOSS will use four different tracers of the underlying matter density field to vastly expand the volume covered by BOSS and map the large-scale-structures over the relatively unconstrained redshift range 0.6 0.6 sample of BOSS galaxies. With ~195,000 new emission line galaxy redshifts, we expect BAO measurements of d_A(z) to an accuracy of 3.1% and H(z) to 4.7% at an effective redshift of z = 0.87. A sample of more than 500,000 spectroscopically confirmed quasars will provide the first BAO distance measurements over the redshift range 0.9 2.1; these new data will enhance the precision of dA(z) and H(z) at z > 2.1 by a factor of 1.44 relative to BOSS. Furthermore, eBOSS will provide improved tests of General Relativity on cosmological scales through redshift-space distortion measurements, improved tests for non-Gaussianity in the primordial density field, and new constraints on the summed mass of all neutrino species. Here, we provide an overview of the cosmological goals, spectroscopic target sample, demonstration of spectral quality from early data, and projected cosmological constraints from eBOSS.

The SDSS-IV extended baryon oscillation spectroscopic survey: overview and early data

The formalism of Wiener filtering is developed here for the purpose of reconstructing the large scale structure of the universe from noisy, sparse and incomplete data. The method is based on a linear minimum variance solution, given data and an assumed \prior model which specifies the covariance matrix of the field to be reconstructed. While earlier applications of the Wiener filter have focused on estimation, namely suppressing the noise in the measured quantities, we extend the method here to perform both prediction and dynamical reconstruction. The Wiener filter is used to predict the values of unmeasured quantities, such as the density field in un-sampled regions of space, or to deconvolve blurred data. The method is developed, within the context of linear gravitational instability theory, to perform dynamical reconstruction of one field which is dynamically related to some other observed field. This is the case, for example, in the reconstruction of the real space galaxy distribution from its redshift distribution When the field to be reconstructed is a Gaussian random field, such as the primordial perturbation field predicted by the canonical model of cosmology, the Wiener filter can be pushed to its fullest potential. In such a case the Wiener estimator coincides with the Bayesian estimator designed to maximize the {\it posterior} probability. The Wiener filter can be also derived by assuming a quadratic regularization function, in analogy with the `Maximum Entropy' method. The mean field obtained by the minimal variance solution can be supplemented with constrained realizations of the Gaussian field to

Wiener Reconstruction of The Large Scale Structure

The Javalambre-Physics of the Accelerating Universe Astrophysical Survey (J-PAS) will soon start to scan thousands of square degrees of the northern extragalactic sky with a unique set of $56$ optical filters from a dedicated $2.55$m telescope, JST, at the Javalambre Astrophysical Observatory. Before the arrival of the final instrument (a 1.2 Gpixels, 4.2deg$^2$ field-of-view camera), the JST was equipped with an interim camera (JPAS-Pathfinder), composed of one CCD with a 0.3deg$^2$ field-of-view and resolution of 0.23 arcsec pixel$^{-1}$. To demonstrate the scientific potential of J-PAS, with the JPAS-Pathfinder camera we carried out a survey on the AEGIS field (along the Extended Groth Strip), dubbed miniJPAS. We observed a total of $\sim 1$ deg$^2$, with the $56$ J-PAS filters, which include $54$ narrow band (NB, $\rm{FWHM} \sim 145$Angstrom) and two broader filters extending to the UV and the near-infrared, complemented by the $u,g,r,i$ SDSS broad band (BB) filters. In this paper we present the miniJPAS data set, the details of the catalogues and data access, and illustrate the scientific potential of our multi-band data. The data surpass the target depths originally planned for J-PAS, reaching $\rm{mag}_{\rm {AB}}$ between $\sim 22$ and $23.5$ for the NB filters and up to $24$ for the BB filters ($5\sigma$ in a $3$~arcsec aperture). The miniJPAS primary catalogue contains more than $64,000$ sources extracted in the $r$ detection band with forced photometry in all other bands. We estimate the catalogue to be complete up to $r=23.6$ for point-like sources and up to $r=22.7$ for extended sources. Photometric redshifts reach subpercent precision for all sources up to $r=22.5$, and a precision of $\sim 0.3$% for about half of the sample. (Abridged)

/pdf/the-minijpas-survey-a-preview-of-the-universe-in-56-colours-1ml56q0sy2.pdf

The miniJPAS survey: a preview of the Universe in 56 colours

We present COSMIC BIRTH: COSMological Initial Conditions from Bayesian Inference Reconstructions with THeoretical models: an algorithm to reconstruct the primordial and evolved cosmic density fields from galaxy surveys on the light-cone. The displacement and peculiar velocity fields are obtained from forward modelling at different redshift snapshots given some initial cosmic density field within a Gibbs-sampling scheme. This allows us to map galaxies, observed in a light-cone, to a single high redshift and hereby provide tracers and the corresponding survey completeness in Lagrangian space including phase-space mapping. These Lagrangian tracers in turn permit us to efficiently obtain the primordial density field, making the COSMIC BIRTH code general to any structure formation model. Our tests are restricted for the time being to Augmented Lagrangian Perturbation theory. We show how to robustly compute the non-linear Lagrangian bias from clustering measurements in a numerical way, enabling us to get unbiased dark matter field reconstructions at initial cosmic times. We also show that we can greatly recover the information of the dark matter field from the galaxy distribution based on a detailed simulation. Novel key ingredients to this approach are a higher-order Hamiltonian sampling technique and a non-diagonal Hamiltonian mass-matrix. This technique could be used to study the Eulerian galaxy bias from galaxy surveys and could become an ideal baryon acoustic reconstruction technique. In summary, this method represents a general reconstruction technique, including in a self-consistent way a survey mask, non-linear and non-local bias and redshift space distortions, with an efficiency about 10 times superior to previous comparable methods.

Sergio A. Rodriguez-Torres

Papers

COSMIC BIRTH: Efficient Bayesian Inference of the Evolving Cosmic Web from Galaxy Surveys