Astrophysics, abstract
astro-ph/0701073

From: Robert Nichol [view email]

Date: Wed, 3 Jan 2007 21:58:58 GMT (127kb)

Dark Lessons from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey

Authors: Robert Nichol (ICG Portsmouth)

Comments: 10 pages, 3 figure, to appear in ASP Conference Series (Proceedings of the "Cosmic Frontiers" conference held in Durham, 31st July - 4th August 2006)

The true nature of dark energy remains unclear: It is either a strange fluid in the Universe, with a negative effective pressure, or a breakdown in General Relativity on large scales.

This question can only be answered through a suite of different observations as a function of redshift.

In this paper, I will briefly review our attempts to achieve this goal using data from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS). In particular, I will present new measurements of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) from the SDSS DR5 galaxy redshift survey as well as outline the on-going SDSSII Supernova Survey, which has already detected (in 2005-06) over 300 SN Ia's over the redshift range 0.05<z<0.4.

I will also discuss the latest measurements of the Integrated Sachs-Wolfe (ISW) effect that now probe the density of dark energy at z~1.5. All these measurements are still consistent with a lambda-dominated universe.

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0701073