Hi Anze!
This is a really interesting paper; for those who missed the release last week, both SDSS and 2dFGRS released results on this sort of topic on the same day. The 2dF paper is also on Astro-ph (
astro-ph/0501174). Both detect evidence for baryon oscillations at about the 4-sigma level.
Bob Nichol gave a talk on this at the RAS meeting last week (and a longer one here at Sussex today). I think it's pretty clear that both Sloan and 2dF have detected something in the galaxy power spectrum, and that something looks like the first acoustic peak of the baryon oscillations. Importantly, the 2dF sample is totally different to the SDSS one, so we have two essentially independent results here.
This type of measurement looks to have a lot of power as a standard ruler test of cosmology. People are already looking to build multi-object spectrographs to go and really nail the wiggles.
Anze Slosar wrote:
In fig 4 the red and black curve become a bit discrepant after 150Mpc... In particular red curve seems to see another peak (while black seems to go too a bit too low so they exactly cancel to produce the expected power... Is this just a statistical anomaly? It seems to me that they couldn't claim the detection of the peak from the red curve alone (although they do say it is a bit noiser).
Looking at fig 4, I'd be inclined to say they were running out of sensitivity by above 150Mpc. From figures 2 and 3, you can see there aren't many data points out there (and those that are there are pretty correlated).
All interesting stuff! :-)
Best regards,
Rich