Ravi Sheth  (Pittsburg Univ. /Univ. of Pennsylvania)

Large Scale Structure in the SDSS                

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  I will describe some measurements of large-scale structure which have been made possible by the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. 1) Galaxies cluster---the correlation function is not quite a power-law. The clustering depends on galaxy type. The precise nature of this dependence lends strong support to the hypothesis that the properties of a galaxy are determined primarily by the formation history of the halo which surrounds it. 2) Cross-correlation analyses of the most massive galaxies and the CMB show a signal which has been interpreted as evidence of Dark Energy. 3) Low density gas in the Universe is clustered. The power spectrum of the lyman alpha forest, computed from a few thousand lines of sight, evolves significantly. 4) Weak gravitational lensing induces correlations between the shapes of galaxy images. These correlations have been detected and interpretted in terms of the cross-correlation between galaxies and mass. I will then spend some time discussing interesting measurements which can be done with the data in hand, but have not yet been done.