Correlation Lengths of Red and Blue Galaxies: A New Cosmic Ruler

Abstract

A comparison of the correlation lengths of red galaxies with blue can provide a new cosmic ruler. Using 269,000 galaxies from the SDSS DR6 survey, I show that the 3D correlation length averaged over many clusters remains very nearly constant at Lo=4.797+/-0.024 Mpc/h from small redshifts out to redshifts of 0.5. This serves as a new measure of cosmic length scales as well as a means of testing the standard cosmological model that is almost free of selection biases. The cluster number density also appears to remain constant over this redshift range.