Wide-angle effects in future galaxy surveys

Abstract

Current and future galaxy surveys cover a large fraction of the entire sky with a significant redshift range, and the recent theoretical development shows that general relativistic effects are present in galaxy clustering on very large scales. This trend has renewed interest in the wide-angle effect in galaxy clustering measurements, in which the distant-observer approximation is often adopted. Using the full wide-angle formula for computing the redshift-space correlation function, we show that compared to the sample variance, the deviation in the redshift-space correlation function from the simple Kaiser formula with the distant-observer approximation is negligible in galaxy surveys such as the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, Euclid and the BigBOSS, if the theoretical prediction from the Kaiser formula is properly averaged over the survey volume. We also find corrections to the wide-angle formula and clarify the confusion in literature between the wide-angle effect and the velocity contribution in galaxy clustering. However, when the FKP method is applied, substantial deviations can be present in the power spectrum analysis in future surveys, due to the non-uniform distribution of galaxy pairs.