Related papers: Cosmic Variance in the Great Observatories Origins…
Deep pencil beam surveys (<1 deg^2) are of fundamental importance for studying the high-redshift universe. However, inferences about galaxy population properties are in practice limited by 'cosmic variance'. This is the uncertainty in…
Cosmic variance is the intrinsic scatter in the number density of galaxies due to fluctuations in the large-scale dark matter density field. In this work, we present a simple analytic model of cosmic variance in the high redshift Universe…
The Great Observatories Origins Deep Survey (GOODS) is designed to gather the best and deepest multiwavelength data for studying the formation and evolution of galaxies and active galactic nuclei, the distribution of dark and luminous…
The discovery of extremely luminous galaxies at ultra-high redshifts ($z\gtrsim 8$) has challenged galaxy formation models. Most analyses of this tension have not accounted for the variance due to field-to-field clustering, which causes the…
Upcoming weak lensing surveys will survey large cosmological volumes to measure the growth of cosmological structure with time and thereby constrain dark energy. One major systematic uncertainty in this process is the calibration of the…
Recent deep millimeter-wave surveys attempt to measure the carbon monoxide (CO) luminosity function and mean molecular gas density through blind detections of CO emission lines. While the cosmic star formation rate density is now…
Cosmological observables rely heavily on summary statistics such as two-point correlation functions. In many practical cases (e.g. the weak-lensing cosmic shear), those correlation functions are estimated from a finite, discrete sample of…
We determine an expression for the cosmic variance of any "normal" galaxy survey based on examination of M* +/- 1 mag galaxies in the SDSS DR7 data cube. We find that cosmic variance will depend on a number of factors principally: total…
We study cosmic variance in deep high redshift surveys and its influence on the determination of the luminosity function for high redshift galaxies. For several survey geometries relevant for HST and JWST instruments, we characterize the…
Cosmological measurements of the 21-cm line of neutral hydrogen are poised to dramatically enhance our understanding of the early universe. In particular, both the epochs of reionization and cosmic dawn remain largely uncharted, and the…
Cosmic voids are underdense regions within the large-scale structure of the Universe, spanning a wide range of physical scales - from a few megaparsecs (Mpc) to the largest observable structures. Their distinctive properties make them…
Intrinsic variations of the projected density profiles of clusters of galaxies at fixed mass are a source of uncertainty for cluster weak lensing. We present a semi-analytical model to account for this effect, based on a combination of…
How much can we know about our Universe? All of our observations are restricted to a finite volume, and therefore our estimates of presumably global cosmological parameters are necessarily based on incomplete information. Even assuming that…
Cosmic voids, the less dense patches of the Universe, are promising laboratories to extract cosmological information. Thanks to their unique low density character, voids are extremely sensitive to diffuse components such as neutrinos and…
Variability is a property shared by practically all AGN. This makes variability selection a possible technique for identifying AGN. Given that variability selection makes no prior assumption about spectral properties, it is a powerful…
In the coming decade, a new generation of telescopes, including JWST and WFIRST, will probe the period of the formation of first galaxies and quasars, and open up the last frontier for structure formation. Recent simulations as well as…
Gravitational clustering broadens the count-in-cells distribution of galaxies for surveys along uncorrelated (well-separated) lines of sight beyond Poisson noise. A number of methods have proposed to measure this excess "cosmic" variance to…
Cosmic voids in the large-scale structure of the Universe affect the peculiar motions of objects in their vicinity. Although these motions are difficult to observe directly, the clustering pattern of their surrounding tracers in redshift…
The relative cosmic variance ($\sigma_v$) is a fundamental source of uncertainty in pencil-beam surveys and, as a particular case of count-in-cell statistics, can be used to estimate the bias between galaxies and their underlying…
Cosmologists will soon be in a unique position. Observational noise will gradually be replaced by cosmic variance as the dominant source of uncertainty in an increasing number of observations. We reflect on the ramifications for the…