A Spherical Harmonic Analysis of Redshift Space

Abstract

We re-examine the effects of redshift space distortion in all-sky galaxy redshift surveys in the formalism of spherical harmonics. Within this framework we show how one can treat both the large-scale linear effects, and the small-scale nonlinear clustering, exactly to first order. The method also allows in principle a determination of the power spectrum of perturbations, requiring no assumptions beyond that of linear theory. The method therefore offers significant advantages over Fourier techniques when dealing with all-sky surveys. We apply our likelihood analysis to both simulated data, and real data, using the IRAS 1.2-Jy galaxy catalogue, for which we find a maximum likelihood $\beta \simeq 1.1\pm 0.3$, and a real-space fluctuation amplitude corresponding to $\sigma_{8,{\rm IRAS}} = 0.68\pm 0.05$.