What galaxy surveys really measure

Abstract

In this paper we compute the quantity which is truly measured in a large galaxy survey. We take into account the effects coming from the fact that we actually observe galaxy redshifts and sky positions and not true spatial positions. Our calculations are done within linear perturbation theory for both the metric and the source velocities but they can be used for nonlinear matter power spectra. We shall see that the complications due to the fact that we only observe on our background light cone, and that we do not truly know the distance of the observed galaxy but only its redshift, not only cause an additional difficulty, but provide even more a new opportunity for future galaxy surveys. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevD.84.063505 4 More Received 26 May 2011Published 2 September 2011© 2011 American Physical Society