The clustering of galaxies in the SDSS-III Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey: baryon acoustic oscillations in the Data Releases 10 and 11 Galaxy samples

Abstract

We present a one per cent measurement of the cosmic distance scale from the detections of the baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) in the clustering of galaxies from the Baryon Oscillation Spectroscopic Survey, which is part of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey III. Our results come from the Data Release 11 (DR11) sample, containing nearly one million galaxies and covering approximately 8500 square degrees and the redshift range 0.2 < z < 0.7. We also compare these results with those from the publicly released DR9 and DR10 samples. Assuming a concordance cold dark matter ( CDM) cosmological model, the DR11 sample covers a volume of 13 Gpc 3 and is the largest region of the Universe ever surveyed at this density. We measure the correlation function and power spectrum, including density-field reconstruction of the BAO feature. The acoustic features are detected at a significance of over 7 in both the correlation function and power spectrum. Fitting for the position of the acoustic features measures the distance relative to the sound horizon at the drag epoch, r d , which has a value of r d,fid = 149.28 Mpc in our fiducial cosmology. We find D V = (1264 25 Mpc)(r d /r d,fid )