The Uchuu–SDSS galaxy light-cones: a clustering, redshift space distortion and baryonic acoustic oscillation study

Abstract

ABSTRACT We present the data release of the Uchuu–SDSS galaxies: a set of 32 high-fidelity galaxy light-cones constructed from the large Uchuu 2.1 trillion particles N-body simulation using Planck cosmology. We adopt subhalo abundance matching to populate the Uchuu-box halo catalogues with SDSS galaxy luminosities. These box catalogues generated at several redshifts are combined to create a set of light-cones with redshift-evolving galaxy properties. The Uchuu–SDSS galaxy light-cones are built to reproduce the footprint and statistical properties of the SDSS main galaxy survey, along with stellar masses and star formation rates. This facilitates a direct comparison of the observed SDSS and simulated Uchuu–SDSS data. Our light-cones reproduce a large number of observational results, such as the distribution of galaxy properties, galaxy clustering, stellar mass functions, and halo occupation distributions. Using simulated and real data, we select samples of bright red galaxies at zeff = 0.15 to explore redshift space distortions and baryon acoustic oscillations (BAO) by fitting the full two-point correlation function and the BAO peak. We create a set of 5100 galaxy light-cones using GLAM N-body simulations to compute covariance errors. We report a $\sim 30~{{\ \rm per\ cent}}$ precision increase on fσ8 and the pre-reconstruction BAO scale, due to our better estimate of the covariance matrix. From our BAO-inferred α∥ and α⊥ parameters, we obtain the first SDSS measurements of the Hubble and angular diameter distances $D_\mathrm{H}(z=0.15) / r_d = 27.9^{+3.1}_{-2.7}$, $D_\mathrm{M}(z=0.15) / r_d = 5.1^{+0.4}_{-0.4}$. Overall, we conclude that the Planck Λ CDM cosmology nicely explains the observed large-scale structure statistics of SDSS. All data sets are made publicly available.