1209.6181 (Ben Hoyle et al.)

Testing Homogeneity with the Galaxy Fossil Record    [PDF]

Ben Hoyle, Rita Tojeiro, Raul Jimenez, Alan Heavens, Chris Clarkson, Roy Maartens

Observationally confirming spatial homogeneity on sufficiently large cosmological scales is of importance to test one of the underpinning assumptions of cosmology, and is also imperative for correctly interpreting dark energy. A challenging aspect of this is that homogeneity must be probed inside our past lightcone, while observations take place on the lightcone. The history of star formation rates (SFH) in the galaxy fossil record provides a novel way to do this. We calculate the SFH of stacked Luminous Red Galaxy (LRG) spectra obtained from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. We divide the LRG sample into 12 equal area contiguous sky patches and 10 redshift slices (0.2View original: http://arxiv.org/abs/1209.6181