English

The relativistic galaxy number counts in the weak field approximation

Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics 2020-10-13 v2 General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Abstract

We present a novel approach to compute systematically the relativistic projection effects at any order in perturbation theory within the weak field approximation. In this derivation the galaxy number counts is written completely in terms of the redshift perturbation. The relativistic effects break the symmetry along the line-of-sight and they source, contrarily to the standard perturbation theory, the odd multipoles of the matter power spectrum or 2-point correlation function, providing a unique signature for their detection in Large Scale Structure surveys. We show that our approach agrees with previous derivations (up to third order) of relativistic effects and, for the first time, we derive a model for the transverse Doppler effect. Moreover, we show that in the Newtonian limit this approach is consistent with standard perturbation theory at any order.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2004.07916,
  title  = {The relativistic galaxy number counts in the weak field approximation},
  author = {Enea Di Dio and Florian Beutler},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.07916},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

17 pages, v2: minor modifications to match published version

R2 v1 2026-06-23T14:54:28.296Z