The power spectrum of the CfA/SSRS UZC galaxy redshift survey

Abstract

The combined CfA2/SSRS redshift catalog has recently been improved and made public. We compute the redshift-space power spectrum of this catalog using the regions at -2.5 < delta < 50 north (8h < alpha < 17h) and south (20h < alpha < 3h, b < -13) of the Galactic plane, where it is 98% complete down to Zwicky magnitude 15.5 and contains 13,681 galaxies. Our analysis uses Heavens-Taylor mode expansion, Karhunen-Loeve data compression and the Fisher matrix technique to compute quadratic band power estimates. This allows an exact calculation of window functions, including the integral constraint, in addition to the production of a power spectrum with uncorrelated error bars. Our results with this larger data set agree well with previous studies. We analyze 101Mpc/h and 130Mpc/h volume-limited subsets in addition to the full magnitude-limited sample, and our results are well fit by, e.g., Lambda-CDM models with bias b=1.2, 1.4 and 1.4, respectively. We estimate the effect of extinction using the Schlegel, Finkbeiner & Davis dust map. Our results are exclusively for the redshift space galaxy power spectrum, so they can only be compared with theoretical predictions if appropriate corrections are made for biasing and redshift space distortions.