Selecting samples of galaxies with fewer Fingers-of-God

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Lizancos, Antón Baleato, Seljak, Uroš, Karamanis, Minas, Bonici, Marco, Ferraro, Simone
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913925474287616
author Lizancos, Antón Baleato
Seljak, Uroš
Karamanis, Minas
Bonici, Marco
Ferraro, Simone
author_facet Lizancos, Antón Baleato
Seljak, Uroš
Karamanis, Minas
Bonici, Marco
Ferraro, Simone
contents The radial positions of galaxies inferred from their measured redshift appear distorted due to their peculiar velocities. We argue that the contribution from stochastic velocities -- which gives rise to Fingers-of-God (FoG) anisotropy in the inferred maps -- does not lend itself to perturbative modelling already on scales targeted by current experiments. To get around this limitation, we propose to remove FoG using data-driven indicators of their abundance that are local in nature and thus avoid selection biases. In particular, we show that the scale where the measured power spectrum quadrupole changes sign is tightly anti-correlated with both the satellite fraction and the velocity dispersion, and can thus be used to select galaxy samples with fewer FoG. In addition, we show that excluding galaxies in haloes more massive than a given mass threshold can help to discard many of the most problematic galaxies. Such selection could be achieved in practice using maps of the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich distortion of the cosmic microwave background frequency spectrum. These techniques could potentially improve reconstructions of the large-scale velocity and displacement fields from the redshift-space positions of galaxies. They may also extend the reach of perturbative models for galaxy clustering, though in practice we find only marginal gains when fitting one-loop EFTofLSS models to simulations with mitigated FoG due to the relevance of other effects entering at two-loop order.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_10587
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Selecting samples of galaxies with fewer Fingers-of-God
Lizancos, Antón Baleato
Seljak, Uroš
Karamanis, Minas
Bonici, Marco
Ferraro, Simone
Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
The radial positions of galaxies inferred from their measured redshift appear distorted due to their peculiar velocities. We argue that the contribution from stochastic velocities -- which gives rise to Fingers-of-God (FoG) anisotropy in the inferred maps -- does not lend itself to perturbative modelling already on scales targeted by current experiments. To get around this limitation, we propose to remove FoG using data-driven indicators of their abundance that are local in nature and thus avoid selection biases. In particular, we show that the scale where the measured power spectrum quadrupole changes sign is tightly anti-correlated with both the satellite fraction and the velocity dispersion, and can thus be used to select galaxy samples with fewer FoG. In addition, we show that excluding galaxies in haloes more massive than a given mass threshold can help to discard many of the most problematic galaxies. Such selection could be achieved in practice using maps of the thermal Sunyaev-Zeldovich distortion of the cosmic microwave background frequency spectrum. These techniques could potentially improve reconstructions of the large-scale velocity and displacement fields from the redshift-space positions of galaxies. They may also extend the reach of perturbative models for galaxy clustering, though in practice we find only marginal gains when fitting one-loop EFTofLSS models to simulations with mitigated FoG due to the relevance of other effects entering at two-loop order.
title Selecting samples of galaxies with fewer Fingers-of-God
topic Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.10587