Cosmic Voids in the SDSS DR12 BOSS Galaxy Sample: The Alcock-Paczynski Test

Understand

We apply the Alcock-Paczynski (AP) test to the stacked voids identified using the large-scale structure galaxy catalog from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey (BOSS).

• This galaxy catalog is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) Data Release 12 and is the final catalog of SDSS-III.
• We also use 1000 mock galaxy catalogs that match the geometry, density, and clustering properties of the BOSS sample in order to characterize the statistical uncertainties of our measurements and take into account systematic errors such as redshift space distortions.
• For both BOSS data and mock catalogs, we use the ZOBOV algorithm to identify voids, we stack together all voids with effective radii of 30-100Mpc/h in the redshift range 0.43-0.7, and we accurately measure the shape of the stacked voids.