Clustering of photometric luminous red galaxies - I. Growth of structure and baryon acoustic feature

A new determination of the sound horizon scale in angular coordinates is presented. It makes use of ∼ 0.6 × 106 Luminous Red Galaxies, selected from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey imaging data, with photometric redshifts. The analysis covers a redshift interval that goes from z = 0.5 to z = 0.6. We find evidence of the Baryon Acoustic Oscillations (BAO) signal at the ∼ 2.3σ confidence level, with a value of θBAO(z = 0.55) = (3.90 ± 0.38)◦, including systematic errors. To our understanding, this is the first direct measurement of the angular BAO scale in the galaxy distribution, and it is in agreement with previous BAO measurements. We also show how radial determinations of the BAO scale can break the degeneracy in the measurement of cosmological parameters when they are combined with BAO angular measurements. The result is also in good agreement with the WMAP7 best-fit cosmology. We obtain a value of w0 = −1.03 ± 0.16 for the equation of state parameter of the dark energy, or ΩM = 0.26 ± 0.04 for the matter density, when the other parameters are fixed. We have also tested the sensitivity of current BAO measurements to a time varying dark energy equation of state, finding wa = 0.06 ± 0.22 if we fix all the other parameters to the WMAP7 best-fit cosmology. Key words: data analysis – cosmological parameters – dark energy – large-scale structure of the universe