Past and present cosmic structure in the SDSS DR7 main sample

Understand

We present a chrono-cosmography project, aiming at the inference of the four dimensional formation history of the observed large scale structure from its origin to the present epoch.

• To do so, we perform a full-scale Bayesian analysis of the northern galactic cap of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 7 main galaxy sample, relying on a fully probabilistic, physical model of the non-linearly evolved density field.
• Besides inferring initial conditions from observations, our methodology naturally and accurately reconstructs non-linear features at the present epoch, such as walls and filaments, corresponding to high-order correlation functions generated by late-time structure formation.
• Our inference framework self-consistently accounts for typical observational systematic and statistical uncertainties such as noise, survey geometry and selection effects.