Probing structure growth with reconstructions of the local universe


  Robert Lilow  ,  Adi Nusser  
Technion

The distribution of structures in the local universe and their flows provide a valuable probe of cosmic structure formation. One way to access this information is to reconstruct the density and velocity fields of these structures, using the distribution of observable galaxies. However, since observations of a finite set of galaxies are contaminated by shot noise, there is in fact an ensemble of possible reconstructions that are all compatible with the observations within the expected noise. In this talk, I will present a method to generate such an ensemble of so-called constrained realizations based on the final release of the Two-Micron All-Sky Redshift Survey (2MRS), the densest all-sky redshift survey to date. This approach combines a noise-suppressing minimum-variance estimator with a generator of random mock galaxy catalogues. After explaining the method, I will show the resulting reconstructions and demonstrate how we can combine them with the Cosmicflows-3 catalogue of galaxy distances to constrain cosmological parameters characterizing the growth of structures.