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Published June 20, 2010 | Published
Journal Article Open

A Method for Measuring the Bias of High-redshift Galaxies from Cosmic Variance

Abstract

As deeper observations discover increasingly distant galaxies, characterizing the properties of high-redshift galaxy populations will become increasingly challenging and paramount. We present a method for measuring the clustering bias of high-redshift galaxies from the field-to-field scatter in their number densities induced by cosmic variance. Multiple widely separated fields are observed to provide a large number of statistically independent samples of the high-redshift galaxy population. The expected Poisson uncertainty is removed from the measured dispersion in the distribution of galaxy number counts observed across these many fields, leaving, on average, only the contribution to the scatter expected from cosmic variance. With knowledge of the Λ-cold dark matter power spectrum, the galaxy bias is then calculated from the measured cosmic variance. The results of cosmological N-body simulations can then be used to estimate the halo mass associated with the measured bias. We use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate that Hubble Space Telescope pure parallel programs will be able to determine galaxy bias at z ≳ 6 using this method, complementing future measurements from correlation functions.

Additional Information

© 2010 American Astronomical Society. Received 2010 March 30; accepted 2010 May 25; published 2010 June 7. I thank the anonymous referee for constructive suggestions, as well as Richard Ellis, Chuck Steidel, Masami Ouchi, and Haojing Yan for helpful discussions. I am supported by a Hubble Fellowship grant, program number HST-HF-51262.01-A provided by NASA from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555.

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